


Sin Eater

by FlyawaySoul



Category: Original Work
Genre: Acts of Kindness, Anger, Angst, Blood Pacts, Blood and Gore, Cats, Cohabitation, Demon Deals, Demon Hunters, Demon is a relative term, Demons, Depression, Dubious Morality, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotions, Fear, Good Demons, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Magic, Mental Health Issues, Mental Link, Nicknames, Other, Pain, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Build, Soul Bond, Supernatural Elements, Symbiotic Relationship, Tentacles, Theological Demons, Triggers, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Work In Progress, demon POV, implied/referenced trauma, mutual survival, not the show, power, sin eater, therapeutic relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:14:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22540810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlyawaySoul/pseuds/FlyawaySoul
Summary: Sin Eaters. A name coined for those who ate the sins of the deceased by dining over their bodies, assuming responsibility for their faults in life. It was a joke where he was from. Within the Under, things don't really have names. Not it's citizens, not their prey, not whatever it is they are. Those, the Under Citizens, exist for one reason only: To eat and to survive. He never intended to be back on the human plane. It had gotten too risky with the churches deeming his kind "demons" and trying - succeeding, even - to kill his brethren. But greed and hunger are powerful voices to ignore. When he answers a summons, promising sins upon which to feast and a safe place to hide as he ate, he finds himself in dire straights. Broken, starving, bleeding, he can only try to survive long enough to reach the Under again. An impromptu deal with a frightened woman may derail him further, but it may also save them both in the process.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	1. Prologue: A Chance Encounter

Faster and faster he ran from the baying hounds hunting him like an animal. The wound that tore across his abdomen refused to heal from the bite of the sanctified silver used to make it and the rain that beat down upon him rolled across the injury like cruel, grasping fingers. Cursing, bleeding, hissing in defiance, he kept running through the pain. Humans were disgusting, vile creatures. He had seen it. This he knew beyond doubt at this moment and the rage of that thought sustained him. 

The dog-like paws he wore were scratched from the asphalt and concrete, but he could not slow down. The pious men behind him would kill him if he let them catch him again. As he turned down an alley, his mottled black sides heaving from trying to escape, he looked up in fury at the solid brick wall before him and cursed his own foolishness. The hounds were too close behind him to retreat from here. He seethed his fright and his shame, the air around him heating with his anger at himself and the world of humans he had been summoned into until the heavy water droplets sizzled. 

With little choice left, he pulled from the magics that made him. His paws became grasping reptile-like appendages, his tail lengthened to help keep his balance, and he sagged with the drain. Just as the first hound rounded the corner, he leaped to the wall of the building blocking his path. The impact made his grip falter and he nearly fell back to the ground as the other two dogs joined the first, their masters and their gnawing silver weapons not far behind. 

Desperation fueled his shaking limbs to hang on to the form just a little longer. He could escape if he could just make it to the roof. Below, the dogs howled and gnashed their teeth in frustration. He paused to hiss down at them instinctively and was punished for the act immediately as a gunshot rang out. The shot slammed a silvered bullet home into his shoulder, just a few inches shy of a killing shot through his neck. 

The warbling scream that drew itself from the demon’s maw raised the hair of every creature that heard it. It was unnatural for this world. It was alien and threatening, so it must be evil. The grip that held him to the wall loosened and he slid down a few feet to only just catch himself and skitter frantically upwards towards freedom. He praised the inaccuracy of the human’s handgun at long distances when the next shot missed and the one after that was only a graze along his lashing tail. 

There was no time to flee to the roof, this form was failing and beginning to slip away. There was only time to dash to one of the windows and try to hide. Whoever lived here had left it just cracked open enough for him to rip it open with his claws and hurl himself in. Three more shots rang out, one shattering the window, and human cursing followed him. 

Safe inside the dark abode, he at first thought it was perhaps abandoned. Bleeding, panting, and ready to collapse, he looked around. His reptilian feet morphed back to a stable biped form. He could wear this shape and consume minimal energy doing it until it was safe to return to his true form. The shape from before, four-legged with paws and a short crop of a tail, was better for running but it took energy he didn’t have to keep himself in that body.

The scratches on his feet from earlier faded just enough to dampen the pain. His taloned feet, more animalistic in the back and hand-like in the front, clicked on the old wooden floors. For the moment, he could breathe. He could focus on trying to close those damned silver wounds. It would take more energy to heal them than the others and he still had a bullet sizzling against the flesh of his shoulder, but it was better than continuing to use his magics to keep his blood from flowing out of the open wounds. Reaching back, he began to cast around in the tunnel the gunshot left for the offending piece of metal and took in the room around him.

The place was a mess. Food wrappers and clothes were strewn about, clear empty bottles of some kind of acrid alcohol scented liquid were lying everywhere. Thick dust had built up in layers on everything and clogged his nose as his skin weakly scared over without the energy to fully reform just yet. He clawed at it irritably with a free hand and sat back on his haunches. As his own pulse began to die down and the bullet clattered against the floor, he froze. He heard it first and then he saw it. 

Wrapped in musty blankets and curled up on the couch was a small, thin human. Her eyes were wide and she was frozen to the core, save for the heart that beat her ribs like a hummingbird’s wings in her chest. She smelled as though she hadn’t left this place weeks, which explained why he hadn’t sensed her immediately. In front of her, on the small table that was just as filthy as the rest of the space, lay a handgun just within reach. She probably didn’t have a silver bullet, but weak as he was it wouldn’t matter. He would not have time to get away from her if she took up the weapon against him, so he stared at her with all six of his monochromatic eyes. She stared wide-eyed back. Neither one was willing to move and risk provoking the other. 

A loud pounding rocked the hinges of the door and shook the dust from the shelf next to it. The sound frightened them both. She flinched so violently that she fell, still wrapped in the blankets. His eyes darted between her and the door, not sure which would be his true death but knowing it would come soon. He hadn’t fed in months and didn’t have the energy left to keep running. This would be his final stand. 

The woman looked back and forth between him and the door as the men began yelling for her to open it up before they broke it down. Her eyes lingered on him for a moment and then the firearm before going back to the door. Without warning, she surged for the gun. He hissed, baring all of the teeth from his reptilian snout to almost where his horse-like head met his neck. She fumbled the gun and nearly fell again before standing up, holding up her finger to her mouth, giving him pause as she hushed him silently. 

Wrenching open a coat closet set into the wall next to the front door, she motioned to it, mouthing _hide_. He didn’t want to trust her. She could just as easily just be trapping him for them, but what choice did he have? He didn’t have the strength to escape or to change his body to something that would survive the leap out of the window. The only choice was to hide or fight, and it would be better for him in the closet where the dogs couldn’t encircle him with their piercing teeth and loud noises like they had in the past. 

When the men began banging at the door again, she jumped. The fright in her face was genuine, he could smell it in the fear-sweat she was releasing now. He wouldn’t trust her words, but he knew humans couldn’t hide their scent like Under citizens could. Relenting, he threw himself into the closet, folding in on himself in unnatural ways while his mottled skin acted as perfect camouflage amidst the dank jackets and sweaters in the dark. Anyone looking in would have a hard time picking out his morphing shape unless they knew what they were searching for and looked _thoroughly_. 

As soon as he was in the closet, she swung the door closed. He pressed a taloned foot out just far enough to keep it from swinging all the way shut so that he could watch through the crack of the door. Tail curled around himself, foot drawn back into the gloom and buried in the dust, he waited as she tried to speak.

“W-wai,” her voice cracked and sounded hoarse from misuse, clearing her throat, she just managed to say, “wait!” in a small voice right before the handle cracked and the door swung in, hitting her with it as she tried to scramble out of the way. She nearly fell again as two of the men surged in, one grabbing her by the neck and slamming her into the front door that he threw shut just as soon as he and his partner entered. 

“Where is it!” he screamed into her face. Her fear-scent doubled and she squeezed her eyes shut, babbling about how she didn’t know what he was talking about. The man, Dan, they had called him at the Institution, thumped her against the wall again, making her wheeze and cough.

“I-I don’t know...what you m-mean!” She was an admirable liar, but the shattered window that he had come in through sat just behind them and did nothing to help her case.

“We saw it come in here. We know it’s here!” Tomas, the other one, roared as he began to kick at the food wrappers and clothes on the floor, leashes of the three dogs clenched in his fist. Luckily for him, their dogs’ noses were just as useless as his here with all the filth about them. Tomas flipped the couch and threw open a door to reveal an equally messy bed and nightstand. 

Dan moved his hands to the girl’s throat in earnest, squeezing her until she began to lose the ability to even cough. Her face began to turn red, then purple. She struggled against him in vain, her hummingbird heart sputtering as he watched from the closet. She was so afraid. She was afraid like he was. She was dying, whether Dan had intended to kill her with his grip or not. He always was an angry man.

Tomas continued tearing down anything large enough to hide his shifting form. Luckily for him again, that was most things if he set his mind to it. The woman’s head began to loll and the fists she had been weakly beating against her aggressor began to slow and go limp. Her eyes, bloodshot and wide, met his through the crack in the door. She was crying. 

He felt... _bad_ , watching her die. It bothered him in an alien way. He knew the name of the feeling, shame, as he had eaten it from guilty humans for millennia. He had never had the experience himself. He didn’t like it at all. It felt grimy like the floors beneath his feet. He didn’t want to die with that oily, unpleasant emotion in him. 

With an internal growl, directed more at himself and the situation than anything, he tensed and gathered what was left of his power into his core. It glowed red under his black skin as it coalesced, slipping through the shadows of his body like glowing veins of rubies and reshaping him until he was coiled in his most basic shape. The one meant for feeding and fighting. Neither of the men saw his eerily long arm slither out of the closet and snatch Dan with three slim, clawed fingers. Each was as long as the woman’s forearm and had either four and five joints. 

He was dragged into the closet with a muffled thump and a yelp that was masked behind the woman’s own fall to the floor and gasping breaths. He forced the man to look into the seventh eye he possessed, set on his forehead between the three other sets of eyes. The iris swirled and the pupil was constantly changing shape as it opened, drawing in his prey and causing it to still in his grasp. 

As he stilled, the hypnotic gaze drew forth this Dan’s deepest insecurities and self-hatred. An unfaithful wife, sleeping with a drunken teenager, a father that had abused him, abusing his own children, shame for the latent attraction for his partner, he was a good meal. He consumed as much of the negative energies of his prey as he could in the short time he had, snapping the man’s neck and shunting him to the side when he was done. The energy of the man’s self-made sins would restore his magics, but the body would be good to eat later. Assuming they survived. 

The other man, Tomas, spun around at the dogs’ baying and found the woman on the floor. He took an angry step towards her, yelling and leveling his gun at her. She curled in on herself, still gasping desperately. Her eyes squeezed shut again and she waited for the death that would not come. 

He emerged from the closet, rejuvenated enough from the brief meal to stand a fighting chance. Standing on two long, muscular black legs with clawed feet that looked more at home in _Jurassic Park_ than they did on any creature alive today, his body was darkness given shape. An unsettlingly thin abdomen that flared with muscle at his ribcage, long arms with long claws that hung down past his knees, and a head like that of a horse’s emaciated skull bedecked with an alligator’s maw, he was terrifying. Frilled down the back of his head and down his thick neck were flowing, wispy tentacles that flared and writhed in his desperation to live. His mouth split far back, nearly to his throat, and was large enough to swallow a man whole. He stood nearly ten feet tall when he wasn’t stooped by a low ceiling as he was now. 

Three sets of red eyes glared down Tomas. His mouth opened with a warbling scream that rattled the bones of the humans in the small apartment. Standing over her with three sweeping tails, each tipped with a barb that leaked a substance venomous enough to down a large mammal with a single swipe. 

“Leave her,” he hissed, “she has nothing to do with our quarrel!” He dropped to all fours. Tomas laughed.

“This woman was found harboring a demon. She will meet the same fate as you will, cretin.”

His blood sang through him with fury, the dull red map of magic beneath his skin pulsing faster. At this range, he could only hope to draw Tomas’ fire away from the woman and give her the chance to escape. Dan had been a good meal, but not enough to prepare him for a demon hunter. He was still too weak to fight much longer after the months of torture and starvation he had endured. The woman had tried to save him and he saw no way out of this building for both of them or himself. The least he could do was to return the favor she’d tried to grant before he met his true death. 

When he lurched he still felt sluggish, like running through water. Even still, he was moving fast enough to startle Tomas. Darting towards the little kitchen, he dove for the island therein. A shot connected with his leg and he heard the dogs’ leashes hit the floor, releasing them to pursue him once again. One was over the island and on him before he could get away. Another had his shot leg in its jaws, shaking its head with a snarl. The third made the mistake of coming near his head and was bitten in two in the blink of an eye, dying immediately as he swallowed the front half down his infernal gullet. The back half of the dog fell to the floor, twitching and spasming for an instant and then going still as guts and viscera sluggishly oozed out of the remains.

There was a loud bang of a gunshot. He was just far enough forward to see the woman as red bloomed from the left side of her chest and she slowly began to wilt like a dying flower. His heart sank a bit and he cursed. His small ploy to save her had failed, but he had no time for pity now. He had done all he could for her, just as she had him. For a brief second, he wished he could at least welcome her to the Under. He wanted to thank her for trying, should that be where she went, but he would never get the chance if he died here. That was a reason to fight, at least. He needed all of those he could get. 

The dog that came over the island for him landed in a field of tentacles, tearing and ripping at them. The beast’s teeth hurt, but not as much as the loud sounds that tore from it and berated his sensitive ears. Yowling like an angry lion, he wrapped the dog in the tentacles. They were meant more for squeezing into small places and performing deft, precise actions, so they lacked strength alone. Together, they mummified the dog against his body, splitting to allow one of the three tails a clear shot to impale the dog. It died with a scream that nearly made his ears bleed and the thick, warm essence of the animal drooled down his back and sides until he unceremoniously let it fall to the side. 

Before he could use his other two tails to gore the last hound, he heard a metallic sliding sound followed by a sharp _click_. He knew the sound of a gun being reloaded. He knew it was time, but at least he no longer felt that greasy human shame. At least he tried. Dying here meant his timeless existence was over, but he was still afraid. Being nothing was a great fear in his heart. It was why he had decided to become an Under citizen, but dying outside of the Under’s protection was it. Millennia of his existence would end with the coming moments. 

He looked to the man who would be his death and tore the last dog apart with his tails, snarling. Tomas was smiling that awful, shit-eating grin of his. It boiled his blood and he wanted nothing more than to rip the grinning lips from the bastard’s face. 

“Let me at least stand,” he rumbled from his place on the floor, “let me die with dignity.” Tomas looked down at him and chuckled.

“Demons to not get to die with dignity,” He pulled the top of the gun back with a sliding click, “You will die like the beast you are.” The man leveled the gun at him and he stared into the dark embrace of the little metal tube that would end eons of existence. 

_BANG!_


	2. Questions and Consequences

His eyes flinched shut unwillingly, but this time there was no pain. There was no gnawing feeling in the wound, only darkness. His ears rang from the sound of the shot and for an eternity he waited for the pain. Pain that never came. 

His eyes opened and he was met with the sight of Tomas, crumpled on the floor with glassy eyes in a pool of his own blood. His hearing began to return and he heard shuddered wet breathing. His eyes then found the girl. There was a bloody trail carved through the carpet of dust where she had dragged herself to sit behind Tomas. The gun from the table rested in a loose grip in her lap and she reclined against a cabinet, more blood leaking out of her mouth and the wound in her chest. Her throat was already beginning to bruise, or maybe it just looked that way because of the flush of her face. He dropped to all fours and scuttled to her. Using his oddly shifting body, he wrapped himself around her to form himself under her body, pulling her into his lap as gently as he could. 

“How do you live?” he hissed his slow, low words into her ear as he settled her against his chest. His arachnid-like arms held her close and the smell of her blood met his nose, “That man’s weapon should have pierced your heart.” He caressed the hole in her chest, quite sure that Tomas’ shot had found its mark, especially with her so close. 

She sputtered a humorless laugh, “Birth defect,” blood splattered from her mouth as she coughed, “situs inversus. My-” more coughing, more blood, “My organs. They’re opposite everyone else.” He looked down at her, knowing full well that this chance encounter had saved his life. She had been willing to die so that he didn’t have to face the eternity that awaited him after his true death. He owed her more than a mere life debt. The gun slid out of her grasp and her breathing became more shallow. 

“Am,” she wheezed, “I going to d-die?” He looked at her, tiny and frail in his grasp, eyes looking forward and glinting to and fro as though they couldn’t see anymore. Perhaps they couldn’t. “I...I thought I wanted to die, but,” her voice was growing weaker, giving in with the rest of her, “I was wrong.” Once again, shame rose high and haughty in his chest. It hissed to him about how he had damned this woman to nothingness or an eternity of slavery. He did this. His stupidity in thinking he could just waltz into the human world like the days of old and consume his fill did this. He cursed in a voice so deep that is sounded like two great slabs of rock were sliding against one another. 

“No,” he said with finality, “but you will have to hang on to this life and you will have to help me… and forgive me. You will never be the same, do you understand me?” 

Blood bubbled from the side of her mouth as she barely got out a weak “okay.” That was all he needed. 

The tentacles caressed her face and helped to tilt her to him, “This will be unpleasant at first, but bear with it. You will feel better after.” The eye in the center of his forehead opened again, commanding even her blind eyes in its magical embrace. 

She sobbed as years of sadness poured through her into him. She was a well of terror and depression. Abusive parents, partners, horrendous assault as a child, failing out of school just before finishing, small conversational faults that added up and weighed on her like grindstones. He was filled with the pain she endured and could have stayed there consuming her agony and fear for hours if he had the time, but he had to pull himself away. The greed and gluttony in his soul fought him with every step. He was so hungry, so drained of vitality. He could only take what he needed for now, though. There was no time for more. 

Once the eye forcefully slammed shut and the connection was broken, she sobbed one last time before a gentle, peaceful look took her face. Eating her pain would give her some semblance of peace and numb her. It would also give him some power to  _ try _ . His tentacles slid into her wound and wrapped around the bullet with ease, teasing it out as he held her steady with fingers that wrapped around her like vines. As soon as it hit the floor, he pulled her back to his chest and slit his own thick wrist against the saw blade of his open maw.

Some of the younger demons would talk about how many mortals “souls” they had been traded through the millennia for their blood. That was more a human idea than anything. Demon blood could mend almost any mortal wound if there was enough of it. In some cases, it gave powers or insight to the imbiber, but the side effects differed for everyone and every Under host. Regardless of the effects, it always linked the two. There were upsides and down for both involved, but it was always an invasive bond on both ends. Humans often became uncomfortable with how enjoyable the experience was for them or the feeling of something else, dark and hungry, constantly being carried with them, but it was all he could do for her. He typically wasn’t fond of having human pets. Too messy, too needy, too risky. He hadn’t offered his blood to a mortal since Galileo Galilei had offered himself up in exchange for knowledge about the heavens.

Pressing his gnarled wrist to her mouth, he allowed his black blood to ooze out like tar. She choked once it hit the back of her throat, but he held her steady, keeping his wrist in place. Her breathing was getting slower and slower and he willed his blood to flow faster, cursing lowly again. She was silent after a moment and he feared he had failed until her eyes snapped open and she latched onto his wrist like a starving leech. Her body almost curled around his arm in her instinctual desperation to live. He winced, already feeling drained, but sharing his magics with her all the same. 

“That’s it, little bat,” he smoothed her hair and caressed at her shoulders and back with soft, shadowy tentacles as he had his thralls in the past, “drink all you need until the hunger is gone.” Her frightened eyes looked up at him, cocking her head to try and get a better look until he stopped her with the black tentacles, “I’m not for you to see right now, just drink, you will have all the time you need to question me later, I promise.” He knew she wouldn’t understand her body’s inability to release his arm until it’d had its fill. Humans were odd that way. Their bodies knew more about interacting with the Others than they did. He leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling as she drained him, continuing to pet her and whisper calming words. At one point he felt warm tears hit his wrist as she curled deeper into him. He made no comment on the movement but adjusted his body around her more tightly all the same. 

He didn’t expect her to need so much from him. They sat like that for over an hour with her pulling his energy from his body in slow mouthfuls. He was panting and beginning to struggle to keep consciousness himself before she began to slow down. Breathing a sigh of relief when he felt the pulls begin to slow, he checked on her again. Her color had returned, the wound in her chest had long since closed, though the clothing there still bore the bloody hole. Her eyes were a dark hazel and met his ruby ones when he looked down at her, though he quickly obscured the borders of his form into a black mass before she could really look at him. 

She was afraid but safe as she slowly pulled back from the wounded wrist she had been nursing. He didn’t want a good look at his true form to frighten her, but he hadn’t the energy to make himself appear more presentable just yet. He hoped she knew that he meant no harm and wanted to say as much, but a firm knock on the door gave them both pause before either could speak. 

“Police, open up or we’re coming in.” He looked at her and she at him in mutual panic. No rest for the wicked, it seemed. 

“Look presentable, I will deal with the bodies.” His voice was so low that she shouldn’t have been able to understand it. Confused and still afraid, she did as she was told and threw herself at her room, looking for the freshest shirt she could find amongst the squalor that she had allowed herself to live in these past few months. He turned to the dogs and quickly swallowed each down. His emaciated abdomen distended only slightly as his body immediately broke down and utilized the nutrients provided. He used his meager remaining magics to remove the blood from the floor and did the same to Tomas.

Once done, he slithered to the closet where Dan’s body lay. It was still presentable enough to pass for a living person, so he wrenched it to the side, opened the jaw, and braced himself for a possession. He hated wearing human skin, but this would be necessary. His body folded in on itself as he crawled into his mouth and down into the body, magically threading himself through the remnants of Dan. His neck snapped back into a living position and he stumbled out of the closet and turned to the door with just enough time to pull himself together as the police called a final warning. He cracked open the entrance and greeted the officers with a sad, tired smile. 

“Hello, officers. Is there a problem?” The two of them eyed him suspiciously.

“We got two reports of screaming and gunshots coming from this address. What’s going on in there?” He thought quickly and settled on a convincing enough lie. Deceit was much easier when humans fed you the guilt they felt over their accumulated falsehoods, usually imparting the lies themselves. He had heard them all, so making one up was child’s play. 

“I was afraid of that,” He opened the door more, “My friend, she has -  _ had _ an abusive partner. She left him recently and he was...not happy with that. She asked me to come over and stay awhile when she left him. She was afraid and rightly so.”

The officers entered the apartment and he set some of his magics to work. They saw a rock on the floor to explain the broken window. The illusory rock became real as they approached it. They hadn’t seen it on the shelf near the door when they came in and would never realize that it had somehow sprung into existence where he had gestured. Moving something so small was still within his drained power, and on it was now written ‘stupid whore’ in red letters to sell the ruse. He moved to let the officers have a better look.

“We only had a few minutes between him throwing this through the window and him breaking in. He had a gun and some kind of attack dog. The dog went after me,” he held up his arms as he manipulated the body he wore to show ugly dog bites down his arms and one on his leg that mirrored the one he actually bore. “He,” he paused for effect, “He attacked her and nearly killed her before I could beat the dog off of me and get the gun away from him. He fired a few shots but didn’t shoot her or anything. He almost strangled her to death before I could pull him off of her.” Most of it wasn’t even a lie. 

“And you didn’t think, during any of this, to call the police?” The second officer looked incredulous. 

“She didn’t want to, and she’s been through enough without me forcing her into something else.”

“And where exactly is she?” The first cop was older and less suspicious than his partner but still needed to be convinced. The demon smiled another sad smile and allowed them further into the apartment.

“If you could wait here, officers?” He knew that she would be aware of the conversation. He had bid her know about it through their new bond, just as he had pushed through the knowledge that he was wearing the meat of the man that had strangled her so she wouldn’t be surprised when she saw him. He went to her bedroom door and knocked on the doorframe quietly. “Little Bat,” he didn’t know her name yet and didn’t want to pull any knowledge from her without asking, especially after what had happened, “you need to come out and speak with the officers. They need to make sure you’re okay, sweetie.” He used the term of endearment to help ease the officers and her small voice came hoarsely from the room.

“Okay,” and she opened the cracked door and came out in a musty t-shirt that had a grease stain down the front and a dancing skeleton motif. Though her major wound had been healed, her skin was still angry and bruised where Dan had grabbed her. She made herself look him in the eye before she regarded the officers with a tight-lipped expression. 

The conversation with the officers was drawn out and tiring. At one point, they asked him to leave so that they could speak to her alone. He was more than willing, knowing that he would be able to feed her information as much was needed. He also knew that he could influence their memories enough to smooth over anything else, should it come to that. He hoped it didn’t, though. He was so tired. As soon as he made to get up and leave them be, her hand shot out to grasp his arm. 

“No. Don’t go.” The desperate look in her eye halted him far more than her surprisingly strong grip. He made himself smile gently and pried her fingers off of him. 

“I won’t be leaving. Just let me at least see what kind of food you have tucked away,” he nodded to the officers and looked back to her, “I’ll be right over here where you can see me, okay? Just in the kitchen.” She eyed him for a long moment before nodding. Even then, he could feel her eyes following him through the apartment as he opened the fridge and checked the cupboards. The police quietly asked a few more questions, thinking he wouldn’t be able to hear them from across the room. As he worked, he reinforced her frightened thoughts with information when he felt her become nervous or comforting words when she stumbled through a response. If their stories were too out of sync, it would create more problems than he wanted to deal with. 

He managed to find a few cans of soup tucked away, so he took two and busied himself with preparing them on the dirty stove. His nose, desensitized somewhat through the body of the dead man he wore, still hurt at the smell. He could feel her hunger echoing his in his mind and knew he’d need to feed just as soon as he had rested and finished settling things here. His blood was magical in nature and it drained him to part with his magics so quickly at the best of times, but now he desperately needed to recuperate. 

On the other hand, the blood she had taken from him would heal the worst of her wounds first. The magic was imparted with survival as its first priority and healing second. Once the first was assured, it would then slowly repair the bruises and other non-lethal damage as the leftover energy was dispersed about her body. It would not feed or sustain her, however, only guide the flesh back together and support her as it did. It could only  _ help _ her heal herself and healing was hungry work. He could feel her through the bond as it settled into the back of his mind like another tentacle or tail. The bond was new and foreign, but familiar enough through years of practice that it didn’t bother him for long. 

The police eventually exhausted their attempts at getting her to press charges or to give them more details and left, the second, younger cop stopping to give the demon a slip of paper with a number on it.

“That Tomas guy comes back here, you call us. Shit like him shouldn’t be allowed to breathe the same air as the rest of us.” The demon forced a stern expression. His inward happiness at having still managed to incriminate one of his past captors, dead or not, bubbled within him.

“I couldn’t agree with you more, officer. Hopefully, he’ll stay gone, though. Cowards like him don’t typically show back up after they’ve been thrown out hard enough,” the demon poured two bowls of the thick tomato soup after tucking the number into Dan’s pocket. 

“We can only hope.”

“That, we can,” the demon agreed. He saw the two men out the front door before closing and locking it behind him. He turned around to see the woman standing on the other side of the coffee table with her small gun already leveled at him. 

“What are you?” She was scared, the gun shook in her hands, and he understood. 

“We have much to talk about, Little Bat. We can do that over food, though, yes? I am starving and I know you are too.” He didn’t need their bond to hear the too-subtle-for-human-perception rumbles in her stomach. He certainly hadn’t risked his life to save her just to have her turn around and die of starvation either. 

After a moment, she acquiesced. Dropping the gun on the table and wrapping her arms around herself, she made no move to take the food. Instead, she watched him as he strode over with the two bowls and placed them on the coffee table in front of the couch. 

“I couldn’t find spoons,” he said as he sat down on the floor with crossed legs so that she could remain standing over him. He felt in his mind a soft but shamefully forceful,  _ They’re dirty. I haven’t done dishes in weeks.  _ It built more and more into an almost wordless panic as she looked around the room.  _ This place is a mess, oh god I have so much I need to do. There’s so much that needs to be done I _ -

“Shh, shh, Little Bat. I can feel you panicking. Come sit, have some soup with me. Ask your questions when we’re done and I will help you, hmm?” He held the bowl of soup up for her inspection, knowing the smell would break through her panic. She took the bowl and hesitantly sat across the table in a lone armchair, still staring at him. Smells always broke through the clouds of instinct. 

“Can you,” she gestured at him vaguely, “can you... _ take him off _ ?” The demon looked down at himself and back at her, returning her gaze with his own solid red eyes instead of Dan’s. 

“I don’t think you want that.” His voice was no longer human but was instead deeper, darker. It rasped out of Dan’s slack mouth, though his lips did not move. She was taken aback by the display for less than an instant.

“I don’t care what you look like, but that man just tried to kill me and I don’t want to look at him anymore.” There was a stern set to her frail shoulders. She needed to eat more. Her cheeks were hollow in an emaciated way and she was pale. She hadn’t touched the soup yet and he didn’t want to make her ill by watching him crawl out of this man like an insect. 

“Leaving a dead body in my state is not a pleasant thing to see. I don’t have the strength to be careful with it. You should turn around if you want me to vacate the corpse.”

“I want to see it. I want to see you.” Frightened but firm. He shrugged and sat down the tomato soup, careful not to spill it. She was determined and who was he to take that from her? He would make her eat later if she didn’t do it now, but she  _ would _ eat so that she could heal. She owed him that, damnit. 

He turned and positioned the body on its hands and knees. His eyes left Dan’s and the body’s mouth hung open. After a moment, the back of the corpse spasmed and folded almost in half, the ribs cracking and spine popping nearly through the skin. There was a wet squelching noise from the throat and something large distended it as it worked itself up and out. He couldn’t see her reaction as he left the body, trying not to tear the form apart in his exhaustion as he wormed his body back into shape and out of the being that had been Dan. 

The tentacles of his head came first, a couple of them sliding out to press open the mouth of his dead host until the lips nearly split. Shortly thereafter his head, covered in blood and a bile-like slime, somehow exited the body. It made no sense and looked impossible as he unfolded himself from crumpled paper to a true form. The rest of his body emerged slowly until he was dragging his last tail out and kicking the remnants of the body off of his back foot. 

He sat like an animal on the floor. His strange amalgamation of limbs had joints in odd angles and his multi-segmented fingers curled into dog-like toes as he sat there. The ruby-red flow of his magic pulsed dully under his skin and flashed weakly in the dim light. He looked back up to her with his six small eyes and waited for her judgment. She was taken aback, to say the least, but she was not screaming or retching. Instead, she clutched her soup tightly and stared at him. 

“Are you happy now?” His jaw opened slightly when he spoke, but without lips, it was warbled and hissed. His mouth closed with a clean  _ sssnick _ sound as the rows of fangs slid past one another like sharp scissors. It took her a moment to find her words.

“I-I,” her throat bobbed as she paused to gather herself and swallowed, “I won’t say it’s good, but at least it isn’t  _ him _ .” He looked over at the corpse as she did. “What are you going to do with him?” She finally asked. 

“I will consume him, as I did the others,” he said, matter-of-factly. Her eyes dropped to her soup.

“Oh.”

He hummed and regarded her for a long moment. She still wasn’t sick or panicking any more than could be anticipated, which was a good sign. He could feel her fear and confusion through their link, but it was as stable as could reasonably be expected in the situation. Both because he was genuinely hungry and also wished to set her at ease, he carefully picked up the bowl of soup in his long, segmented fingers. They unrolled like butterfly mouths from the paw-like shape they had been before and he held the soup with the very tips of the digits until it was near his serrated maw. The tentacles of his head whipped forward like living vines and caught the bowl, drawing it into position as he opened his jaws to show impressive rows of teeth. The tentacles unceremoniously splashed the entire bowl into his mouth, at which time he snapped his teeth back together and swallowed it down. 

He knew it would be comical to see for her, and it was. She snorted a light sound of near frantic laughter and a fraction of her fear subsided if only for the moment. He continued the show by snaking out a long black tongue, as big around as a baby’s arm, and licking the inside of the bowl clean with its forked tip. The demon placed it back on the table when he was done and regarded her again as he felt a question bubble up within her. 

“What  _ are _ you?” She leaned forward as she said it, still eyeing him like a fascinating but dangerous fish hauled up from the abyss of the ocean. 

“I am me, Little Bat, and you are hungry.” A long, spindly tail whipped around, poisonous barb carefully tucked away and nudged the bowl closer. “You must eat. Your body is healing from great trauma today and will need the sustenance. Meat is best for such things, but this was all I could find in the cupboard.” She looked like she was about to argue, so he added, “We agreed to eat and then to ask and answer questions. I will not tell you anything so long as I can feel your hunger clouding my mind on top of my own.” 

She very nearly pouted at this. Held back probably only by the recent occurrences. He curled up like a great black cat on the floor, snorting at the dust that entered his nostrils. He could still see her, and she him, from around the corner of the table. Reluctantly she began to sip the soup. Something between pain and relief washed over her face and her sips, though still slow going and hesitant, came in longer and more frequent waves. 

Careful to keep her shut out from his thoughts, he turned his attention to his own plight. Grateful though he was, he had been an idiot. The church would hunt this woman for her involvement with him. They had ways of finding his kind, although he didn’t know how. They were very tight-lipped about it and, from what he had gathered, only some of them had the ability or access to whatever assisted them. The woman would be hunted just as he was if they caught on to what had happened here. 

Cursing internally in his twisted native tongue, he damned himself a fool for taking another thrall in this day and age when he was stuck on this atrocious plane of existence. In times past, he could have fed off of her misery, giving her freedom from some of the pain, but now he was worried that even doing that could attract the holy men like flies to a carcass. Moreover, he would have to convince her to allow him the right. He was not the oldest of his kind in the Under, but he was old enough to feel a sense of obligation to adhere to the contracts he held mortals to. Relationships such as the kind they had with humans hinged upon trust, unfortunately. A human could just as easily be used to capture a demon as they could be used for food by that same creature. 

_ Messy. _ He thought to himself as he regarded her with a neutral gaze. Not that he had many facial features that could convey emotion. His mouth was like that of a crocodile as he was now, with only small muscles in his cheeks capable of expression. Lipless, incapable of a firm scowl or distracted smile, nearly scentless, and with red six pupil-less eyes - he was a hard read, even for his own kind. Centuries of survival and careful training to control his emotional states gave him control over the wash of tentacles and the three tails that made up for his stoic visage. He used that now to carefully stop himself from flicking the appendages about like an irritated cat. 

He was just mulling over how much he didn’t want to be here on this plane, in this apartment, or around humans in general when he heard her bowl click softly against the table with a hollow sound. Empty. He allowed himself to feel her state. She was still greatly shaken as expected and a bit nauseous from the food, but her hunger was sated for the moment and her curiosity stoked like a well-blown forge. He settled in, his body more than eager to finally rest somewhere, and readied himself for the conversation to come. 

“What exactly are you?” It sounded more like a weak demand than a question. He sighed dejectedly. 

“I am me,” he continued as she started to protest, “I am of the Under. We are all similar and different. No two of us are the same, but many of us have similar needs and wants. The best I can tell you, to that regard, is that I’m what a human might mistakenly call a ‘demon’ and what a ‘demon’ might humorously refer to as a Sin Eater.” He drew his hand-paws under his chin and rested his head atop them, looking every bit like a something out of an old illustrated church book about the dangers of fraternizing with hellish creatures. 

He could taste her questions as they rolled through her head. She was curious, but nervous to speak in a way that had nothing to do with what he was and everything to do with the act of speaking itself. Her hesitation was stained with sadness that made his veins burn with longing. His body could go for ages without food, but what could pass as his soul - the magical energy that held him together - needed sustenance far more frequently. 

“How many of you are there?” She finally managed.

“How many humans are there?” He shot back, eyeing her, “I do not keep count of the coming and going of the Under citizens.” She nodded, deeming this response fair.

“How did  _ you  _ get here then?” He paused as the words fell clumsily from her hoarse throat in a way that made it seem that she didn’t often talk this long or this much, even given her bruised neck. As she finished the question, he grumbled low and deep in his chest. Her back hit the cushion behind her as she recoiled. 

“While you may not have tried to kill me since our paths crossed, I know as well as you do that humans are cruel, evil things,” he allowed his tails and tentacles to thrash with the violence of his emotions, he had earned it. “I did not come here on my own. I heeded a summon. I came to the promise of easy food and a comfortable hiding place in exchange for the power that I could grant to my summoner.” He rose to all fours and began paced from one side of the room to the other menacingly, a great black lion born of abyssal shadow and caged red lightning. 

“I was  _ betrayed _ . Captured. Shackled. Tortured.  _ Starved _ !” His ire grew, fed violently by his hunger in a way he wasn’t at all used to, and with it the steady pulse of the red roadmap under his skin. Growling, head tossing, and hissing between the words, they were almost unintelligible. Almost. They would have been if not for the link the woman shared with him. Each step was a bellow blow into his fury. “Those bastard men at that bastard church. I was a  _ science experiment _ to them.” He paused, seething but making a point to halt the downward spiral before he scared or hurt the woman. She had done nothing wrong. This was his fault and the fault of that damnable church. Even as he stopped pacing, the very shape of him trembled for an instant before he schooled himself back into a calm demeanor and sat at the opposite end of the table. The woman was visibly shaken.

“I apologize. I am very tired and very hungry. Please rest assured that you are not the focus of my rage.” It took her a moment to relax back into her seat. He remained quiet and still, the only movement about him coming from the wash of his mane as it moved almost of its own accord. 

“What did you do to me? And why.” The second part wasn’t a question so much as a firm demand. 

“I saved you. I gave you my blood, my magic. It healed you, but it also created a blood pact between the two of us.” Her face went from confused to alarmed and he held up an unfurling hand so that she would let him finish. “It is not a pact like those your myths would lead you to believe. It is a connection through which we can communicate thought and emotion. It will be nothing more unless we  _ both _ wish to make it so and I have no intention of invading your thoughts past the barest surface impulses unless necessary.” He put his hand down. “As for why...Because you showed me a kindness and were going to die for it. I eat the emotions that haunt others. Anger, lust, guilt, pain. If it is an emotion that can consume you, I consume it in turn, like a leech that feasts on toxic blood. That said, I live through the emotions beside my thralls as I eat. Just as a snake cannot be poisoned by its own venom, I am not prone to such emotions,” 

He flicked his tails as one and looked to the side, “no matter how poorly I behaved myself a moment ago, I am not used to feeling human emotions,” his eyes narrowed as he stared off into the wreckage of her bedroom, “I felt,” he shuffled uncomfortably, still refusing to look, “shame.” He had to force himself to meet her eyes. “I didn’t like it. I can see why humans are so quick to offer it up to me. Because of that, I decided that I needed to at least  _ try _ .” The woman nodded slowly, chewing over the information like a piece of gristle. 

“Thank you, then. For trying.” She was wringing her hands in her lap, looking obviously uncomfortable now and trying, from what he could glean, to think of which question to ask next.

“Don’t thank me,” He rose again, moving to investigate the window he had all but fallen into, “I only did it because I did not think I would be able to save myself. One of us walking away would have been better than neither.” He pressed a hand to the wall next to the window and looked out at the alley which led up to it, listening intently for the sound of more pursuers or hounds. They would have made it up to the apartment by now if there had been, but he needed to be positive. He tried funneling his magics into the broken window, willing it to repair itself, but after all that had transpired, he only managed to make a few small pieces shake and wobble back towards the window. He hated being so powerless, but even in all this, he heard her when she muttered under her breath. 

“I can be grateful that you tried, whatever your reasoning was.” He paused and looked at her, though she probably assumed he hadn’t caught the statement. She wasn’t looking at him, but rather down at her hands. She picked at the skin around her fingernails and her pulse fluttered. The rain was still falling and the moisture helped to weigh down some of the dust in the air but it also gave the place a musty, old smell. Even so, he could smell the adrenalin under her skin fading. She would be tiring soon and he already was. 

“Very well, then. I will not argue with your gratitude,” he sighed, a soft counter to the surprised sound that came from her when she realized she had been heard, “but I will also take it as an invitation to make a request of you.” The shadowy mass of frills on the back of his head rippled like soft seaweed. She looked at him, unsettled anticipation surfacing in her scent and roaring in her mind, but hidden on the surface by a stubborn set to her mouth. She was well versed in not appearing half as frightened as she was, but that would never fool him. 

“I-I can try.” She fumbled and recovered, hiding her halted declaration behind the act of clearing her throat. He looked at her a moment more, giving her time to impose limitations on any potential favors asked of her, but she had nothing more to say. She was a fool. A lucky fool, as any other of his kind might have had much more harmful things to ask of her. 

“I need somewhere to rest. I’ve scarcely slept or eaten in months. I cannot guarantee that more of those men will not come looking for me here but with some rest and food, I am confident I can fend them off if they do.” He stalked over to where she sat, walking around the chair close enough for her to touch his silky, dark skin. His dark mane rustled in surprise when she did just that, pausing him in his quadrupedal stride for a moment but otherwise not phasing the old creature. 

He’d encountered humans like this before. Nervous and frightened of other people, as they should be given the blatant disregard and cruelty of their fellow man, but just trusting enough in his inherent  _ otherness _ that they didn’t feel so uncomfortable with him. Such people had often suffered terribly at the hands of other humans. More than one had responded to his curiosity about the reaction by asking what he could do that could break them any more than they were now. They were typically wrong, he had the experience necessary to be far crueler than a mortal human, but he admired the bravery in their naivete. 

It was a bravery they were only fractionally aware of and it made them excellent thralls. Filled with pain and suffering, ripe for the picking, but not so afraid as to hold back from offering it to him. Delicious, exploitable, willing, and apathetic to their own well being. He toyed with perhaps taking advantage of this woman he was bonded to by happenstance, but the ugly feeling of shame threatened to return when he did and so he disposed of the idea with minor irritation at himself. He was hungry and he would not let it make him so weak as to affect the standards to which he held himself. 

“So you just want to sleep here?” Disbelief. She’d been guarding for a punch and instead received a pat on the head in comparison, “That’s all you need?” He blinked, starting from his back-most set of eyes and moving forward. 

“No, I need to  _ eat _ , but I will take care of that. There is much suffering and carrion in this town for me to feast upon, but few places I can rest undisturbed.” Her brow furrowed. 

“So you need both? ‘Sins’ and actual food?”

“Flesh of the dead to restore my bodily strength and the suffering of humans to replenish my magic - my soul or spirit, if that makes it easier to think about. And it isn’t just the suffering I can eat. I can consume any strong emotion, though I personally prefer the bad ones. That is why my kind calls me a Sin Eater. It is the energy of the emotion that holds me together, not the intent.” She thought about this. As she did, he filled the silence with his own question. “You have heard much about me tonight, Little Bat, but tell me one thing. What is your name?” 

She started to answer and then paused. A strong flash of thought crossed her mind, something like asking if he were like the fairies of old stories that would curse her if she gave her true name. The sweet babe. It pulled a low, rasping chuckle from his parted jaws.

“Keep in mind that I only ask as a courtesy. I do not want to invade your privacy. As is, I can hold off all but your strongest thoughts and emotions, but if I wanted I could invade your mind as easily as I ate the corpses that were in your living quarters.” She drew up for a moment at his words but seemingly eventually came to accept them. 

“Lily,” she finally said in a small voice “My name is Lily.  _ Just _ Lily.”

“Very well then,  _ just _ Lily,” there was a mirthful taste to his words that he allowed her to feel through their bond for good measure, “But I also need you to understand that it will take time for me to recover. I will be staying here for a while, depending on how often I can feed.” She nodded, unsurprised but still switching between anxious worry and curiosity. “I can alter my shape to most any form once I’ve taken the time to rest. I will be able to tuck myself away and out of sight in any corner you would be willing to lend to me. That said until I’ve recovered a bit I’m afraid you will be stuck with this pleasant face lurking in the shadows.” 


	3. Exchange

He didn’t expect the small smile she gave him when he asked where he was to sleep, but it wasn’t unwelcome. Even a Sin Eater doesn’t mind not being spat on at every turn, he supposed. She continued to surprise him by asking him if he would rather have the bed or the couch since she didn’t think she would be able to sleep much that night anyway. This drew a true, hearty laugh from him. He’d have slept under the sink if that had been what she offered. 

Lily rose and moved around the table to gather his discarded soup bowl when she shrieked. Through some miracle, the bowl she was still holding from her own meal didn’t shatter when it hit the floor. It clattered off to the side as he lurched forward in front of her, prepared for some kind of further trickery or surprise attack from the church. He had only enough time to curl a tail around her and crush her safely to his flank before he saw what had drawn such a scream from her. 

It was the corpse he had vacated earlier. Nothing more. Its face was crumpled and distorted from his clumsy exit. The eyes had shriveled to leak blood into the floor, and the neck had returned to a sickly broken position. He growled, irritated but not so devoid of patience as to blame her for the reaction. Lily was human and she was already taking this situation better than most. Possibly even better than he was, relatively. A large breath entered and left him, soothing the flash of ire and relaxing the grip his tail had on Lily, who was already stammering apologies as she almost fell away from him. 

“It is fine, Bat,” he looked up at her from where he stood on all fours, the ceiling was too low for him to do much other than crouch if he stood on two legs. This was more comfortable than stooping, “I do not blame you for being human. It is not normal for most to keep the deceased strewn about the floor, hm?” He meant it to be a lighthearted comment, but she gave him a very serious shake of her head in response. “Go,” the mane of cilia swished in unison towards her room, where he could only assume the bathroom was kept, “bathe and relax yourself. Let me take care of this. I do not want you to have any more nightmare fuel today.” Lily looked as though she wanted to argue and thought better of it.

“You won’t leave though, will you?” She put a cold hand on his back and he paused. She was too trusting of him, but there were worse traits to have in a thrall, he supposed. 

“I would not have requested you house me if I intended to leave.” He left it at that. Lily stood there for a moment longer.

“When,” she took a deep breath, “When I was dying, you know, before. You ‘ate’ my sins too, didn’t you?” He turned his head to peer at her with a row of red eyes. 

“I took only what I thought I would need to save you,” Lily wasn’t able to hold his gaze for long before she dropped her eyes, “I should have taken more. I was worried you were going to drink me dry, Little Bat.” She tried to give a small smile at that, but it fell flat under the thoughts flitting across her face. 

“My memory is...fuzzy,” her brow furrowed, “I don’t feel as bad as usual. I don’t feel as,” she paused, looking for the right word, “heavy?” He nodded and pulled away from her touch to sit next to the corpse.

“A side effect. It is temporary and will wear off in about a day, give or take.” He knew what she was going to ask him before the thought could make it’s way across her mind and into his. “I am in the midst of starving to death. If you want me to do it again, of course I will. Just know that without the fog of imminent death, it will be a much less enjoyable experience. And there are side effects. The most prevalent being that the more often I do it, the more you will feel emotionally drained or numb to those emotions. This can at times spill into other emotions, affecting your ability to feel happiness and the like just as it can with fear or sadness. Also, as I draw from the memories more, the more vividly you will begin to remember them once the effect wears off.” He shrugged, “It differs for each individual, but such is the nature of the  _ feast _ .” He chuckled at his own poor attempt at a joke, though she seemed to have missed it in her deep thought. He bid her again to go bathe with a long hum of his words.  _ He _ had thought it was funny.

She was just entering the doorway to her room when she turned to him again. As thankful as he was that she had saved him, he desperately wanted her to leave before he shoved the dead man on the floor down his gullet like a great, horrible snake. It was through millennia of practice that he reigned in the exasperated groan and head toss he wanted to let out. It had been months since he’d had a good meal and he had eaten not an hour ago. He could wait for a second longer to answer her questions. 

“What is your name?”

The old Sin Eater lifted a bony brow, though anyone looking would have been hard-pressed to notice. A name? He had never had one. Some of his thralls called him this or that, depending on what the current society viewed him to be. Some called him a god, a devil, a spirit, sometimes a vague entity that was an amalgamation of other things. He had a sneaking suspicion that such an arrangement wouldn’t work for this woman. Everything  _ had _ to have a name these days, he had found. Gone was the time that people were content to call a stone a stone or a river a river. 

“My people do not typically keep names.” The look on her face at that statement proved him right. Before she could argue,  _ oh surely they call you  _ **_something_ ** , he cut her off, “If you wish, you may coin a name to call me. I do not care what label you put on me, so long as it is with dignity. I will most certainly  _ not _ go by some asinine pet name.”

Lily lifted a brow, “That hit a nerve, didn’t it?” She knew the answer to that as well as he did, so he didn’t deign it with a response, “You’ll have to tell me the story sometime.” He grumbled. He would not be sharing that story. Still impatiently waiting to consume the corpse at his feet, he purposefully allowed the silence to become awkward. After enduring it for as long as she could she left to bathe and he finally got to eat the remnants of another of his captors. 

The meat felt good sliding down his throat. Heavy, hearty, as filling as something like himself could hope it to be. He liked meat. He liked the flesh and the way it shredded under his razer fangs and pointed claws. Oh, he savored this meal, unlike the others from earlier. He savored each arm, each leg. The sound it made as he tore them from the trunk, a wet ripping of flesh and a harsh popping of joints. To a human, it would sound like tearing denim. To him, it sang a song of survival and sustenance to his severely wounded pride and hollow stomach. He was equal parts savoring both a hearty meal and the fact that this man had made his life hell but now it was  _ he _ that was being consumed for his foolishness. It was finally the ‘man’ who would feed the ‘demon’, as it should be. 

By the time that Lily had reemerged from the shower, there was nothing left of the corpse that had belonged to a misguided holy man named Dan. Every ounce of his flesh, each drop of his blood had been consumed. The demon, however, was curled up on top of his oddly jointed limbs like an animal with his nose tucked against his side in Lily’s bed. He cracked a couple of eyes when she emerged from the shower and started at the sight of him. Towel clutched tightly to her chest and only just exposing the fading scar of the gunshot wound on the top of her breast, she laughed apprehensively. 

“I see you decided on the bed?” She forced a nervous smile.

“You offered it. I am big. The couch is not. This is more comfortable for me, but I can move if you’ve changed your mind.” He did not want to move. That much was evident in his voice. He was still trying to be patient with her, but the trancelike resting state that substituted for sleep to those of the Under was so close. He could feel it brushing against the tips of his claws and was eager to embrace it fully. 

Thankfully, Lily seemed to understand that and simply nodded before grabbing some clothes and returning to the bathroom to change. He chuckled at that. Some human things never changed. Like the fact that many would try and parade this sense of modesty about him. It was amusing. Most of the magical rituals he needed to do his dealings with humans were performed mostly or completely nude, which made it even funnier to him. More comical still were the few who took it into their head to seduce him, usually for power. Laughable. As though something like himself cared overmuch for pleasures of the flesh outside of eating it. After a few dozen bodies, you know what they look like. Some humans didn’t seem to grasp that. 

He was almost completely submerged in his trance state by the time Lily emerged from the bathroom again. She wore shorts and as clean of a shirt as she could find. He felt more than saw her move around the room to grab a pillow and left. Sinking deeper and deeper into the trance, he found himself enjoying the soft bed and even the dank smell of not being in the basement of a cathedral in a reinforced cage. 

He passed time in this manner for hours, collecting what little energies he had left to expend and distributing them about his body. Healing wounds, pushing out the silver, and storing what he could. He could feel Lily’s thoughts, dark and slumbering nearby. He had to be careful or his own thoughts would bleed into hers and affect her dreams. Some Under citizens didn’t care if they harrowed their thralls’ sleep with the strong emotions that held them together. It had led to the idea that demons brought on troubled dreams. While not wholly false it wasn’t necessarily true either. Luckily for Lily, he found fear to be a sour, gross emotion. He disliked the taste and it did not bring him any joy to cause it even if he was able to feed on it, so he did his best to keep his essence well separated from her sleeping mind. 

He was just filling in the bullet wound from earlier when Lily’s thoughts suddenly lit up in terror. Pure fear. Fear, unlike anything he had caused in her in their brief time. The certainty of death, the instinctual rejection of dying, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Her arms and legs were lead and  _ something was sitting on her chest. Oh god someone help me, please! Please get it off of me!  _ **_Help_ ** _!  _ He unintentionally found himself sinking into her thoughts, drawn in by the sheer terror she flung through their connection like the crack of a whip. It was a bitter sharp taste, but the absolute quantity of it and the nauseating power it promised flooded into his depleted mind. He jolted him towards the door in a burst of energy, sure that something was in the room by the utter horror he felt through her mind. But nothing was there. 

He looked around the room, Lily’s sheer acrid emotion still forcing itself into him, energizing but confusing him. Taking a liberty he wouldn’t have under another circumstance, he dove into her mind. Swimming past the fear and ignoring the flashes of memory, he commandeered her sight. Her arms and legs would not move and what she was seeing leered down at him with a shadowy, shifting face. The humanoid thing was crouched on her chest with arms and legs that were too long and jointed at odd places like his own. Big, black, owlish eyes looked down at her unmoving. It didn’t breathe through the mouth that stretched almost all the way across its misshapen gray head. It just stared at her, bits of its thin and stringy hair falling into her face. 

He moved slowly, not sure what the thing was as he couldn’t sense it for himself. Lily’s fear hadn’t ebbed at all and while he was begrudgingly resisting the urge to start feasting on it in his current state, it felt unnecessarily cruel  _ not _ to take it. When he reached the couch, her eyes were wide and filled with the kind of terror that someone dying has for their killer. He experimentally swiped at the thing and observed through her eyes that it did not move. She didn’t even see his hand. Only it, only the fear. There was room for nothing else. 

It didn’t take long for the old Sin Eater to come to a realization. Her mind, alight with the powerful emotion inside of it, was wide awake while her body was almost still asleep. She wasn’t completely conscious. Instead, she was in an almost half state. He knew what was happening, or he’d heard about it at the very least. She was having one of the paralyzing waking nightmares humans sometimes got when they were stuck in between sleep and consciousness. It was a hallucination. 

He sat on the floor next to her face and curled his tails about his hands and feet like a cat, looking down at her with his six red eyes. The patterns under his skin pulsed a little more brightly in the presence of the distasteful flood of negative emotion. He cocked his head and watched her for a second, unsure of what exactly he should do. Her breathing was fast like a rabbit after escaping a hound, but in her mind, she still was crushed under the sensation of being suffocated again. A few more seconds passed and it didn’t seem as though it was going to let up too quickly. The fear was making him want to wash himself, it was so strong in both scent and taste. It was enough to irritate him. 

Fed up with waiting and the feeling of fear up against him like a sluice of something sticky, he leaned near the woman’s face and tilted it towards him with soft, moving shadows. Her eyes came with it and fresh waves of terror hit her as her mind conjured more of the strange, mishappen humanoid things about the room. Looking through her eyes and seeing himself, he had to admit that he didn’t look too out of place amongst them. Even so, once she registered him, the fear subsided. He wasn’t one of them. She knew that. 

The soft tentacles patted at her cheek, prodding her body awake, “Come on, Little Bat. You are seeing things. Come to me and leave them be, hm?” His voice was low and soft and rattled through her mind as he slipping into her consciousness. Tugging and pulling at her still sleeping limbs, he drew them back to her control with care. Her eyes began to droop, her breathing slowed, and she blinked. All seemed calm, something he had only just let himself feel pride for before she went stock still and lurched upwards. He watched as her arms wrapped around her own body and she nearly failed to swallow a scream. 

Lily was breathing hard again, hyperventilating and scarcely holding herself together as she rocked back and forth frantically, tears streaming down her cheeks. He had long since retreated from her mind for her own privacy, but physically stayed just as he was, sitting still and quiet next to her pillow. She muttered something unintelligible and turned to him, tears in her eyes. The Sin Eater cocked his head, still distracted with the urge to eat.

“Take it. The fear. You can take that, right? You can take it. Just  _ get it out of me _ .”

Her words were clear and he was ravenous enough to waste no time, falling upon her like a withered hound upon a rabbit. Cracking the single, hypnotic eye on his forehead, he caught her gaze with the shifting, lulling dance of it. His body snaked up in front of her in an alien way as he cooed comforting words to her in a strange language and voice, neither of which was meant to exist in this plane. 

A long hand gripped the back of the couch. Another braced against the floor. He was over and atop her in a cacophony of oddly bent joints, moving almost like a spider. She vaguely understood that her back had hit the couch. Her fear, still singing through her mind with all the allure of cooked maggots, nutritious but revolting, promised to be a hearty but distasteful meal. He drew the fear into him, pulling it all out of her like pus and wanting to gag and spat as he did, though his body felt stronger for it. Within a few minutes, her mind had slowed down. Her breathing stabilized and her body relaxed into a comfortable lull. 

Lily stared into his singing eye as this happened. She was aware of all that he did, he knew, but she was powerless to stop it. Second by second, they walked through her episode of sleep paralysis together. She could feel herself waking up, unable to move and seeing the  _ thing _ on her chest. She felt the constricting feeling again, almost in greater clarity, and her breathing sputtered like she was having an asthma attack. She saw the thing in her mind’s eye. She saw them all as he had tilted her head to see him. She felt the awful weight on her chest tenfold as they all looked at her in that unsettling alien way. They were wrong. Dangerous. They were going to suffocate her and she would die and - 

But the longer it went, the less the fear gripped her. The longer she experienced the memory in the strange new way he was showing it to her, all at once rather than chronologically, the less it scared her. After a time, the thing on her no longer scared her. The things like it that had stood around the room in varying sizes and shapes no longer held power over her. Thinking of it caused no more pain than not thinking about it, which was also easier to do. So faded the entire episode. Moment by moment, it was stripped of the fear-fueled power it had over her, leaving it as a ghost of its former self that could be brushed away just as easily as the dust on her floors. 

When he finally released her, she didn’t move for a long time. He didn’t think anything about it but simply returned to his place sitting next to her pillow, peering down into her face. When Lily stirred finally, it was to take a deep, relaxing breath. She let it out long and lazily, a feeling of tired serenity flowing across the bond to him. If he had lips, he might have smiled like a skilled lover over their latest conquest, but he didn’t and so kept an air of silent dignity instead. Her head rolled over to look at him. Bleary-eyed and holding the slightest of smiles on her lips, she chuckled. 

“I see what you mean,” her eyes drooped closed slowly, “It isn’t pleasant.” He hummed in response, waiting for the point she seemed to be approaching. “But  _ this _ . If that’s the price for waking up like that and being able to sleep again in the same night, take it. Take the fear. Take all of it you want.” He rumbled again as she sighed

“I hate eating fear, but food is food,” he licked his chops with a long tongue to emphasize the point, “If it is something you wish to exchange with me, we can discuss a deal in the morning. For now, we both should sleep.” Her eyes were still closed and she still wore that half-drunk little smile, but she nodded to show she had heard him. Without another word and almost no sound at all, he returned to the bed. Curled up and with sustenance coursing through him once more, he began chasing his own rest again. He’d need more energy to restore him to his former glory, but this was a good - though unpleasant - beginning. The energy in his veins was tinted an orange hue for a time before the red of his own energy overtook it again, shining brighter than it had in months. He was safe. He was content.


	4. Agreed

He did not stir the next morning, as he had said he would. Lost in the realm of his trance state, it was not until that afternoon that he uncurled from his place on the bed. He had been deathly still as he slept, never changing positions and seemingly not breathing either. A few times, he felt Lily’s curiosity or concern that he was dead rather than sleeping. Aside from an irritated flash through her mind to keep her from trying to ‘wake’ him, he did not respond to any outside stimulus. There were sounds of things being moved about in the other rooms of the apartment, but without any indication of a threat from Lily, he left it be. 

That was one of the benefits of having a thrall. They worked like sentries without even realizing it. Most Under Citizens did not allow their thralls to keep mental privacy from them, more for security than anything else, but one didn’t have to be entrenched in the mind of another to sense strong emotions like alarm. In a resting trance, he or any other of his kind could access the thoughts of their bonded humans and see through their eyes, hear through their ears. Secrets typically weren’t allowed because it put them both at risk when the human tried to hide things from the ones they had pacts with. They were often just as much at risk as the demons they protected. Some of his kind, those who were particularly paranoid, would even feed through the link, though it was less efficient than when using the singing eye and devouring it face to face. 

At two in the afternoon, he decided to finally rise from the bed. He stepped down onto the floor feeling leaps and bounds better than he had. He didn’t stretch after all the time spent motionless, which he felt a curious, snooping Little Bat in the main room of the apartment become unsettled by, even if she didn’t know why. He flicked his mind out at her, brushing against her consciousness just long enough to convey his desire for privacy so that he could decide how he wanted to look now that he had the energy to alter himself a bit again. 

She acquiesced easily enough and went back to whatever it was she had been doing. The main room, from what he could see, was much brighter than it had been last night. He wasn’t interested in finding out why just yet, so he silently stalked to the bathroom and centered himself in a long mirror attached to the wall just in the door. Still unable to alter himself into something appearing to be of this world, he could at least stop trudging about like a common dog. That would have to do, for now, he supposed. Pride may goeth before fall, but he had already fallen square on his ass when he left the Under. May as well try to keep what little pride he had left and be able to look at his little thrall eye to eye. It would make him feel better, if nothing else. 

With a flick of his mind at Lily, he gave her his intentions so that she wouldn’t stumble across him and think he’d let something else into her apartment when she wasn’t looking. If she was willing to feed him her emotions, establishing trust would guarantee more fruitful and more frequent feedings for himself. Communication was the key ingredient to trust amongst humans. They liked it when you told them the plans you had for your courses of action. It made them feel like they had some part in it, whether they did or not, and sometimes even made them _want_ to be a part of it. 

Bracing a three-fingered hand - if you could call it that, he lacked a palm in this state - on the bed. Pulling his being inward, he became smaller and more compact. His skin thickened, obscuring the arcing lines of energy under it until they were almost like slight, glowing veins. His tails bound together into one long rope of an appendage. It was almost as big around as his thigh and would still pack a powerful blow if it came down to that. He would keep it that way for now just in case he needed it for defense. The possibility of the churchmen busting through the door at any second still weighed heavily on his mind.

Two sets of eyes closed, limiting his peripheral vision but making him more relatable to the human mind. The more human he appeared, the more trusting humans like Lily would trust him. He weighed the arrangement and concluded he didn’t like the lessened visual range with the threat of death or reimprisonment still hanging so ominously above him, so he called forth the second set again, compromising to keep only the third stowed away. During this time, arms that were multi-jointed condensed to a more humanoid arrangement, though they still swung low for a normal person. His finger-like claws added a digit, a palm was formed. He was still down a finger compared to humans, but that was okay. These hands could better interact with his environment than the slashing, grasping things from before. They were still tipped with wicked claws.

He paused, thinking about what to do with his face. The snout filled with teeth would be useful if the church returned again, but it was easier to talk if he didn’t have to fight his own jaws to do so. It would be helpful in striking a formal agreement with Lily. As a general rule, humans trusted what looked like them. It typically put them at ease and led to better deals for his kind. He thought for a moment more before deciding to go with safety. Deals could be amended, lost lives could not. His head kept proportion with his shrinking body, though he was still tall and lean for all his downsizing. He could stand fully erect now and only just have to duck through the doorways. Size was an advantage against the dogs and the guns his enemies favored, so he would bear with the stooping for now. 

He still wore the emaciated horse head with the crocodile’s smile, albeit with a shorter snout and less reptilian tongue. The wild, living mane never truly left him, even as he altered his entire being. It couldn’t, not even if he were to pass as a person. It simply masqueraded as hair when it did. All demons have a tell when playing at human. Some had a tail, others had otherworldly eyes or claws, but for him it was the wash of grasping tentacles atop his head. For now, for security, he kept all of it, leaving it to flow from the crown of his head, across his shoulders, all the way down to the base of his tail. The change and reorganization of his body made him feel almost faint. Irritated at something that was once so effortless now made the room sway, he vowed in his own twisted tongue to kill as many of that damn church as he could get his claws on before he returned to the Under. With any luck he’d meet a few of them there after he killed them so that he could kill and devour them again. The thought made the wash of grasping shadows down his back lash in anticipation. 

Vengeance aside, he was content with the balance of utility and defensibility he had made. He stumbled a bit as he lifted himself up onto two legs and made towards the bedroom again. The old Sin Eater was surprised at what he saw when he returned to the bedroom and looked out into the common room, leaning into the door frame for support. The sun was bright today, streaming through the broken window and it’s twin in the small open kitchen, whose blinds had been raised all the way to the top. The living room and kitchen were basically one room, just with countertops and cooking appliances set to one wall and a small island to determine where the living space ended and the cooking space began. Trash that had littered the floor and other flat surfaces was almost completely gone and the dust had been partially corralled into a corner next to an empty trashcan. Lily’s physical absence and the lack of a liner in the bin were easy enough to piece together.

The rest of the room had been similarly tidied. It wasn’t perfect by any means, perhaps not even what some would consider ‘clean,’ but it was certainly an improvement. Here and there, there were patches of dust stuck to something on the floor. Those spots would need hot water to be rid of. The dishes, now clean, overflowed from the dish drainer next to the sink with the excess resting in clean, damp stacks on a stretched out towel. The scent of the soap she used, some kind of chemical bastardization of green apples, made him crinkle his nose when it caught and focused his attention. He heard footsteps down the hall as he gathered himself and Lily entered soon after. 

Lily paused when she saw him, staring in something between vague curiosity and uncertain fear. She knew it was him, his face was nearly identical save for size, but she didn’t know what to think about that. Her eyes lingered on every part of him. He could see her processing the body he had made as he stood, grasping the doorway with a decidedly more human-looking hand than last night - though it did only have a total of four digits on it. The effort of changing his shape in what was still a very weak state had him ever so slightly winded, so he let her look her fill. When her eyes dropped between his legs out of morbid, human curiosity, he chuckled. Her face lit up in red embarrassment when he did, knowing full well what she had instinctively done and that he _knew_ she had done it. He was not some silly body-bound human. There was nothing to see between his legs unless he wanted there to be. 

“While I’m flattered you find me to be so nice to gawk at, it would probably be for the best that you closed the door before you either have to explain what I am to someone or I have to eat them, hm?” The door was hurriedly closed. She wouldn’t look at him now, the silly Little Bat. Too self-conscious and nervous to say much. The trepidation she felt at the thought of finding something to talk about consumed her quickly and she began to wring her hands again. He stared at her for a time, mirroring her own curious gaze from before. 

She was slight, this Lily. Slight in an unhealthy way. Dark bags hung under her eyes and her whole face seemed to droop with the weight of what they carried. Her shoulders caved as if protecting her neck, now free of nearly any trace of the bruises from the night before, and her hands stayed poised in front of her body like writhing little shields. Last was the way she stood, constantly shifting her weight and moving subtly from one side to the other in such a way that made it seem like she was trying to hide behind her own body. She was a pisspoor sight and that was _after_ his blood had ran its course. If he’d taken the time to look at her like this last night, he would have taken far more of her energy before he had healed her. She looked like a sad ghost of a person, even now, and he was lucky mending her body hadn’t destroyed him. 

“This place is cleaner than it was before. It looks good.” He finally said. The small praise brought an equally small smile to her face. It did much, in spite of its size, to lift the weight of the poor health he could see there. 

“I felt better today. I was able to get up and move for once,” her eyes finally met his, that spark of stubborn fierceness peaking out at him again, “Thank you for that. Last night, other than the,” Lily waved a hand vaguely, “the crazy men with the guns, you helped me a lot. More than you know.” 

“I know exactly how much I helped. I saw it. I felt it with you as I ate it.” He dropped his hand from the door and took a slow, staggering step forward. Perhaps he should have stayed in his base form longer, or all fours at least. His balance was shaky but he stubbornly attributed it more to him changing too fast in his state than anything. If it wore off within an hour or two, he’d know. “I may not understand how you process the relief of being without pain, but I can understand the force of the emotions I eat. It is hard to explain.” Her brow furrowed at him and he gave a very human shrug in response. 

“So what now?” 

He mulled over the statement as he made his way slowly, like an old man or perhaps even a toddler, to the chair next to the table. It was closer than the couch and he was still tired and hungry. Without the desperation to live fueling him today, he felt his poor health full force. He hated it. When he got to the chair, he shuffled his tail to the side and fell into the seat, drawing his knees to his chest and resting the hocks of his legs just on the edge of the cushion. His wicked talons and odd, grasping toes hung between them, his tail curling over them comfortably. If his stomach could growl, he felt it would have. 

“You offered to strike a deal with me last night. We can discuss that, if you like.” Hunger was ever foremost on his mind, followed by rest. Striking a deal with this wisp of a woman could be mutually beneficial, but also instrumental for his own survival. He was worried about trying to hunt like this, especially with the Churchmen still hunting him. Being able to hole up in this den of a space under the watchful eye of a friendly thrall would be his safest option. They hadn’t found him and come barging in to kill him since last night, so it should be safe enough for now to eat. It would probably take them a few days to realize that the men had failed to find or kill him. If he was lucky, it would take them at least a week longer to determine that the bastards were dead and longer still to figure out where he was so that they could begin hounding him again.

“Right.” From what he could tell between their bond and her actions about her living space, she was nervous but feeling better than she had in a very long time. Good. That gave him an upper hand in negotiating, especially since she knew that he was the one who had brought her relief. Lily was still standing there, peering at him with big green eyes. He wished she would either just do something and stop being nervous or commit to being leery of him. This swinging back and forth was going to become frustrating if this was what their partnership was to come to. 

“Please feel free to move about or to sit. This is your home, Little Bat. My presence here does not change that.” He tilted his head back and closed his eyes. letting her see his weariness. It was something they shared and would ease her nerves. He felt more than saw her move to sit on the side of the couch furthest away from him. That would do. She was quiet and he let her chew the thoughts he felt rolling in her head. He shouldn’t be so hard on her nervousness. Just because she was taking some parts of this well didn’t mean he should expect her to take _all_ of it in stride. Hell, he was hungry. 

“Why do you keep calling me that? Little Bat?” He rumbled at the sudden question. 

“Because you nearly killed me when I offered you my blood, or essence. Whatever you want to call it. You were like a hungry little bat and it is not as rude as calling you a ravenous vampire would be.”

Lily chuckled, “I don’t know, ‘Ravenous Vampire’ makes me sound dangerous and cool.” He cracked an eye to look at her and found her looking at the tip of his tail near the floor.

“Would you rather I call you that, then?” Her eyes flew up to meet his. She actually seemed to think about it for a moment. 

“No. I like the bat thing. It’s cute. It makes you feel less scary.” His eyes closed again and he let her words hang in the air. He wanted her to want him to speak. This was not his first deal and being in the poor situation he was in, he needed to head the negotiation for his own safety. Rules needed to be set, boundaries acknowledged, limitations imposed. He needed a food source and she needed to be able to function through her pain. There was kindling, he just needed to spark the fire so they could both be warm. Another few seconds and he would-

“I thought about it a lot while I was cleaning, and I’m willing to give you my fear,” Lily’s words snapped his attention to her. The movement was too fast to be natural and she faltered at the alien snap of his head before recovering and continuing on, that stubborn streak sneaking into her eyes and words with deceptive strength. “ _Only_ the fear, though. Nothing else until I know you better.” He felt what could be his stomach turn. 

“I hate the taste of fear. It is repulsive. Choose another emotion.” He almost sounded like a child, even to his own ears, and he cursed her for it sourly in his mind. This was not how he wanted this to go at all. 

“I know you do. I could feel it when you took it from me last night.” Her eyes were sharp now. It was as if the ghost of an entirely other person was heaving away the tired weight on her face to steadily meet his gaze, “That’s why I decided that I will let you have all of it you want. Because I know you’ll only take what you need.” There was a twinkle in her eye, the clever little shit. Perhaps she wasn’t too trusting of him after all. Good for her. He was reluctantly impressed, even if it put him in a less than ideal spot.

“It would seem that I ate too much of your fear last night, hmm?” His voice was dark as he eyed her, tilting his head. Lily’s frail throat bobbled as she swallowed, but she forced herself to meet his gaze. She did not falter and he eventually sighed and relented. In a lighter shade of his abyssal voice, he continued. “What do you ask in return, then, _Ravenous Vampire_?” Lily gave him a mock scathing look and then sat back to think. She was sitting very similarly to how he was, still hiding behind her own body with drawn-up legs and arms wrapped around them. Her chin rested on her knees as she looked forward at nothing but her thoughts. 

“I don’t need much, honestly.” Lily’s eyes drooped and she looked around, almost as though looking for something she could ask for in return.

“It is not a deal if we do not both walk away with something. That is typically the way of things,” it was because humans needed to feel their partners were worth the eventual side effects and sometimes even dangerous circumstances that came with harboring a demon. People do not throw away what they feel they need. “I can get you whatever you want, given the time and strength to do so. Power, wealth, fame, sex.” She winced at the room before her and shook her head. 

“I have money. Enough to last me a while if I don’t waste it. I don’t want power or fame. And sex,” she said the word like she was referring to a dangerous animal, “sex is dangerous these days.” He could feel her unwillingness to expand on that and did not push her. If he played his cards right, he may come to devour what had caused the statement, so he instead filed away the knowledge for another time. 

“What about material things? Diamonds, gold? I even know how to get rare spices if that is archaic enough to strike your fancy.” She giggled and shook her head at the absurdity of his offer. He allowed himself to sag, poorly feigning being hurt at her response, “No one ever asks for spices anymore. I liked gathering spices. They always smelled so nice.” The tension that had snuck into her posture from the short bartering they had done, if it could be called that, left her shoulders and she laughed in full. 

“You just like them because you like to eat, don’t you?” He didn’t expect the comment, but it was an accurate one. It made him look at her, long and hard. He was beginning to think, _But surely not_ , that this Lily he stumbled across might not be half as naive as he had taken her for. Shame. He had been hoping for _something_ to be easy for him in all this mess. Oh well. 

“Perhaps you are right, Little Bat. Perhaps you are right.” Her laughter faded after a while and she sighed, rubbing her chin from side to side on her knee absentmindedly. 

“I don’t know. I always wanted a cat?” For something that did not necessarily need to breathe air at all, he came very close to coughing. 

“Beg your pardon?”

“A cat. My family would never let me have one. My mother hated them and hated litter boxes even more. I could understand the litter box thing, but she thought cats as a whole were vile.” Her eyes found his face. Even she could almost see the shock in it and she smiled. “The issue now is mostly my landlord. She doesn’t allow any pets. I was able to sneak an old fish tank in, but it kind of,” she shifted uncomfortably, “fell apart right after I set it up. It burned itself out about the same time I did. That’s something else I worry about with having a cat. If _I_ fall apart again, I don’t want it to suffer.” Lily went from picking at her fingers to picking at the hem of her jeans. She looked sad. 

“So you are willing to...to let me siphon off your energy, bit by bit, potentially - but not necessarily - scarring you for life or leaving you as an empty husk... _for a cat_ ?” He’d been asked for many things over the years. Jewels to make a king envious, wealth enough to buy a kingdom, power to crush opponents, strategy to win wars, the fertile bodies of potential mates, even knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but a common house pet? She would wager her soul, her life, for a _house pet_?

There was a humorless snort from her side of the room, “A cat that won’t ever suffer because I’m it’s owner.” His hands rubbed against the fabric of the chair as he sat and pondered this. “Hell, make it talk too, that’d be cool. Being around people makes me nervous, but I think I could talk to a cat. It would make me less lonely. The therapist I used to see said that would help me.” 

Now there was a challenge, though he still didn’t quite equate it to what she was offering him, he supposed it didn’t matter. A cat that could speak and would not suffer from having a potentially neglectful owner. It didn’t take him long to think of a viable solution. 

“Give me a week,” his words were confident. If he could smile a sly smile, he would have. Regardless of how absurd the request was, this might be his greatest deal yet. “Give me one week and all the fear your little heart can muster, Bat. Do that, and I will give you what you wish for. We can further discuss or end the agreement then if you find the payment acceptable. Agreed?” He slid his hocks off the cushion and uncurled his lithe tail. He moved with all the grace of a snake as it stalked its next meal. He noted with satisfaction that his balance was back. Good. He would need to hunt soon if he was to pull off this deal. Even the downtrodden Lily would be hard-pressed to be his only source of food, but her fear would be more than enough to get him back on his feet. 

Lily’s body drew up into a smaller position as he leaned his long body over the table and presented his clawed hand to her. She looked at it for a moment before hesitantly reaching out and taking his hand in her own. Her grip was shaky but tried to be firm. His palm folded around her hand. "Agreed," she echoed. They shook once, and the deal was struck. 

It had been four centuries since he’d had an objective other than merely eating to get by. Four long centuries of wandering listlessly in the Under, feeding on wayward souls that were not strong enough to escape or not determined enough to live that they became like him. That and the bodies of others who would steal his souls from him. Four centuries of _nothing_ but the bare minimum of existence. 

Perhaps that was why he had heeded the summons when he felt it’s call. Yes. That was why he had battled tooth and claw to be the one through the closing gate. That was why the others fought too, it had to be, though he doubted they realized it any more than he had. He’d been starving for it. He knew that now without a doubt. He had been searching for it when he threw caution to the wind and came back to the human plane. He’d been a greedy fool to do it, yes, but perhaps it was because his own soul had remembered something that his mind had forgotten the feel of. Perhaps he had been even more of a fool to think he could exist for an eternity without it. Regardless, he had it now. 

_Purpose_.


	5. Cohabitate

Not much happened in the coming days. He was thankful for that. Boring meant safe and safe meant rest. At nights he would leave for two or three hours at a time, scouring the surrounding area for carrion and occasionally drawing the emotion out of a lone human in a dark alley. The city was big enough that there were plenty of places the bright lights never touched and the only kinds of people who walked there were either very bad or very ill. He had no qualms in feeding on either. What he took from the miserable fools was like the carrion he ate. No one would miss it. 

When he returned on these nights, gorged on the sins of any fool he could lure close and the bodies of everything from rats to an entire deceased person he had once found rotting behind a dumpster, he would settle down in the living area with Lily in case the Churchmen returned. They liked to attack at night. 

To her credit, Lily had settled into the routine fairly quickly. She had been eating more and moving about more often, too. Slowly but surely, the apartment began to look like the home of a person and not just an animal den. He wasn’t a fan of the dwindling chaos, but it was not his home so he said nothing about it. Filth was easier to hide in than order, that was all. 

Lily would eat and attend other things while he was out, but she was still loath to go too far from the apartment. Groceries and other necessities were delivered to her and she busied herself reading books, some she had on hand and others ordered online. She was content, but he could tell that with each passing day she came closer and closer to leaving her cocoon of safety. A few times, he had just sat outside the apartment and watched her from a distance before his hunts, wondering what she was like without him lurking underfoot. 

She read, mostly, but once she had gathered herself up with a sense of purpose he could feel from her. Dressing in her newly laundered clothing, digging out a pair of shoes, fussing over her hair. Lily intended to  _ do _ something, that much was obvious, but when she got to the door, she just stopped. She just stared. Her hand had reached towards the handle of the door and he waited for her to fling it open and walk out to rejoin the world, but she didn’t. Instead, a wave of quivering anxiety swelled up and broke against the shores of her courage, washing it down the frenzied currents of her thoughts. 

Her hand fell to her side, her heart filled with shame, and she turned back to her room. She changed back into the pajamas she had been favoring that day and the day before. The clothes she had been wearing weren’t put away, he later found, but rather left in a miserable pile. He left when he felt her begin to cry. By the time he had made it back, she was only just beginning to pull herself together. Lily didn’t want him to see her like this, but there was no hiding from him. Even so, he said nothing about it and pretended not to notice. He could feel her gratitude for it, even though she had to know he knew. 

Four days into the week, she looked up excitedly when he returned to the apartment. Lily folded the corner of the page to mark her place and closed it before standing before him. Suspiciously, he eyed her. His shape melded into the black-skinned humanoid. The form now with a more humanoid face, as he had taken to the day before now that he was reasonably sure the church wouldn’t be bursting through any time soon. His power was steadily being returned to him along with his confidence that he could defend this new territory and the thrall he had taken up. 

“So I’ve been thinking and I think I have a name for you,” Lily had proven to have an ever quiet voice, but she sounded energetic now. She seemed quite pleased with whatever nonsense word she’d picked to refer to him as. He crossed his arms and braced himself for the worst. Lily faltered a bit at his otherwise unmoving visage, rubbing her neck as though it were stiff and clearing her throat, “Uh, feel free to say no, but I thought maybe you would like it.” She reacted a lot more poorly when she couldn’t read his more expressive humanoid face than his less than telling natural one. Perhaps he should change it back?

“Very well, let’s see what you’ve come up with.” His voice was still deep and flat, but the words lacked the hissing and the scraping of his jaws against one another, making them easier to understand. Lily shuffled for a moment under his unmoving gaze.

“I-I liked,” she paused and took a deep breath, fear of the disappointment she was already envisioning in her head, “I liked Orobas.” She said the last part in a mumble and he cocked his head. It wasn’t bad, he had to admit. He’d certainly been referred to as worse.

“Where did you find this name, Little Bat?” Her eyes ducked to the side and she mumbled something unintelligible. The demon sighed heavily and dropped his arms. When he took a step forward, his shape flowed like water and he dropped down to the form that moved like a beast, his face returning to its natural state. She watched him from the corner of her eye, curiosity flavoring her anxiety. He closed the distance between them and sat back on his haunches, lifting himself up to grasp her shoulders with humanoid hands lacking a digit.

It was the most physical contact that they’d had since the night they met when he’d cradled her dying corpse, but they were thrall and demon now. He had seen things in her mind that not even she was comfortable knowing about herself. He had devoured it for her. She didn’t pull away and she did finally made contact with some of the six eyes that looked down at her, even in his sitting position. His tail wrapped around him, creating a safe barrier between the two.

“Little Bat, you do not have to worry so much. I can feel your fear. If I haven’t already given enough of an indication, I have no intention of hurting you, especially when you are sheltering me. I would tell you if I find the name or anything else distasteful, and you can feel the truth of my words if you want to.” The intent and the truth of his words moved slowly through their bond, giving her the chance to pull away. She relaxed a bit in his grip, whether she knew it or not.

“Oh,” was all she could manage. 

“The name is not expected, but good. Tell me why you chose it.” He dropped Lily’s shoulders and looked at her, now slouching to be about eye height with her. She fidgeted still, wringing her hands in that way she did when she was nervous. He was patient, but only through practice. 

“Well, I um,” the stammering was what got on his nerves the most, but he knew she had to work herself through every conversation. Some conversations were better than others, but any time he had the power to reject her words, she became a mess. Nonetheless, he waited, silent and steady though unwilling to give her any indication that it was time to run. If he did that, she would just think he was angry with her. “I kinda looked online. At Wikipedia, ya know?” He did not know. These words meant nothing to him. 

“I am not familiar with Wikipedia.” There was no shame in his words. He hadn’t been on this plane in centuries. Lily looked surprised and launched into a description of what exactly a wiki was and how to access it. He didn’t care what it was or how she had found the name, but she seemed to do well with the topic change so he listened and asked careful questions to let her know he was paying attention. It was a good thing he did. While the internet was a concept he wasn’t sure what to think about, but he tucked away the information on how to access and use it. It could be useful in a pinch. 

“And I found your name here.” Lily had that quiet, embarrassed inflection to her voice again. She was sitting on the floor next to the low coffee table with what she called a laptop placed on the wooden surface before her. He loomed over her with his massive form, still sitting like some common beast and resting his weight on his front legs, planted to each side of the small woman so that he could look over her and down his long face at the screen. 

The wiki she had summoned held a list of “Theological demons” in alphabetical order. As she scrolled down the page, he recognized more than a few names from other boasting demons in the Under or the memories of those demons he had consumed. A couple he had even been called once upon a time. 

“I remember the name Solas.” He pointed at the name as she rolled past it, “It belonged to me many incarnations ago.” The edges of his mouth were almost smiling. 

“Really?” She craned her neck upwards, wincing slightly, to peer at his boney chin and he tilted his head at a sickening angle to meet her gaze and nod. “But Solas is some kind of bird thing. It says he teaches astrology? And he knows about,” she trailed off and a hint of understanding crossed their bond as she read the rest of the description, “Herbs. Like spices.” It was a sarcastic statement more than a question. The old demon - Orobas for now, he supposed - hummed in confirmation. He liked spices. 

“I have been many things. I was once like a bird. I enjoyed flying. With time, flying became both dull and dangerous. I relied on it too much, so I did away with it.” Her thin little brow furrowed. 

“If I could do that, I think I’d rather die than to lose the ability to fly.”

“What good is it to fly if you are killed and can never even see the sky again?”

She had no immediate response to this until she took a deep breath and said quietly, “Is it really living if all you’re doing is surviving?” It sounded wise, he supposed, but in the most naive way imaginable. 

“Yes. Death is not near as peaceful as your kind thinks, Little Bat.” Before she could continue, he changed the topic. “So tell me now. Why is it you chose the name you did?” Lily hesitated but relented and scrolled back up the page to the “O’s” before selecting the name in question. He knew immediately why she had chosen the name. The image of a horse-headed, upright humanoid was the obvious answer. He couldn’t fault her for it, even if there were some very key differences between himself and the picture. It pulled a chuckle out of him.

“It was one of the only ones that had a kind of flattering description.” He could hear her pouting.

“The etching had nothing to do with it?”

“It might have been why I stayed long enough to read the description.”

“Fair enough,” he rumbled, “then I will respond to this name, Lily.” She turned and craned to look up at him again. She winced again when she did it, as though her neck was sore.

“You like it?” Her voice was hopeful. 

“I dislike the notion that I need a formal name, but it is a name I can bear without qualms.” Lily’s brow furrowed and she began to say something that he knew would be along the lines of  _ I’ll choose something else then _ or  _ I need to know if you dislike it _ so he cut her off by dropping his large head down to her side and butting her with it in a very horse-like manner. “It is a fine name. Now go do your sleep ritual.” Like most humans he had seen, Lily always did the same things before sleeping, though she needed help starting the cycle. She had asked him the night before to help keep her on track, almost as though she was running a trail for a race or studying for a test. He didn’t mind. It was easy work for a roof over his head and sins to eat, even if it was still only disgusting fear. 

Orobas rose from his sitting position as Lily grumbled and scurried off to the bathroom, morphing back into the smooth-faced humanoid as he did. His face was handsome in a perfectly manufactured way, with high cheekbones and soft lips under a straight nose and a single set of big red eyes framed in thick black lashes. His visage was still the dark ebony color of his true form and as expressive as a marble statue, but he was much more humanoid. His legs became slimmer and his arms shrank with the rest of him as he became short enough to pass for a just-too-tall, wiry human. The arcs of red energy were as obscured as human veins beneath his skin and the wash of tentacles retreated to the disguise of a human enough hairline. 

He was vulnerable in this form, so even when he grew humanoid ears, they remained large and pointed like something out of a fairytale. His tail was also still present and tipped with the wicked stinger, but it was only as wide as his forearm at its base, speed over strength. Clawed, satyr-like legs were still his preferred method of bipedal locomotion, for now - human knees were inefficient and annoying. He also just liked the graceful way these legs looked more. 

When Lily exited the shower and returned to the living room, toweling dry her mop of brown hair, she nearly jumped out of her skin for what felt like the thousandth time this week. Orobas had come to lounge across the entire couch, head propped on his crossed arms and supported by her pillow, his long legs rested across the far arm of the couch, and his taloned feet hung off the sofa further still. His tail was lazily draped over his stomach and his eyes were closed in a peaceful way as his wash of writhing black hair flowed like it was caught in a gentle current of water. He was as beautiful as a Grecian statue piece in a museum, made of polished onyx and half as approachable. 

Lily stood in the door, not sure if he was sleeping or not, he knew, and just looked at him. Humans never got used to the shifting nature of his kind. To them, it was unnatural to change shape, color, or even size. To the Under, it was a necessity. He let her look her fill to get it out of her system. Her clothes shifted when she amassed the courage to move again and took a step forward.

“Orobas?” Lily’s voice was low and hesitant, the kind that wouldn’t wake someone sleeping. He considered not answering and letting her think he was but ended up dismissing the thought with a sigh. 

“Yes?”

“I need to sleep.”

“Yes.” She hesitated at his monosyllabic answer. 

“You’re on the couch.”

“Yes.” He was being unhelpful on purpose, he supposed. It was needlessly cruel of him, but he was still hungry and she would let him get away with it, so -

“If you don’t get up and eat, you can go to bed without dinner.” Lily’s voice was laughably weak in her attempt at sounding threatening, but the fact that she had tried was impressive on its own for her. He cracked open a glowing eye and looked at her for a long moment, face as neutral as the loose beige shirt she wore. To her credit, she met his gaze and held it until he relented, even though she began wringing her hands.

Orobas withdrew the long, graceful legs and his tail slipped off of his stomach to flick lazily near the floor like an amused cat. When he sat up, he did it in an oddly human motion that caught her eye and rested his elbows on his knees as he eyed her back with a not-quite-expression of amusement that no human would be able to perceive. Lily approached and sat next to him on the couch, settling in for what was always an unpleasant walk down memory lane. 

Most of what he had eaten thus far was from the sleep paralysis, though there were a few drops here and there of other things that he’d only just gotten a taste of before she pulled away. These other things were just different flavors of fear, so he didn’t feel the need to chase them. Orobas leaned back into the cushions behind him and let her get comfortable. This had been incorporated into her little sleep ritual, so she had been experimenting with different positions to make it easier on herself. Doing so always marked the start of her rising anxiety. She hated the part where she had to vividly, though briefly, relive the fear but she hated constantly living in it more. The second night he had fed from her, it had made his mouth water. Now that he wasn’t so horribly starved, it made him want to rub the smell of it out of his nose. 

Lily put her back against the armrest of the couch and crossed her legs as she had the night before. Then she thought better of it and shuffled so that she was nestled in the crook where the armrest connected to the back of the couch so that she could lay her head against the cushion. She went to straighten out her legs after a few more moments of shifting but stopped when her socks touched his leg. For all his patience, she was wearing it thin with the shuffling. She’d be exhausted and ready to sleep in any position once he had finished, so what her positioning before that had to do with anything was beyond him. None of his other thralls in the past had ever acted this way. 

It took several more long minutes of shuffling, getting up to get a drink, resettling, and fidgeting again before he rumbled deep in his chest. She was stalling. 

“What is it, Little Bat.” The nickname had grown on the both of them. Lily stilled.

“I’ve been sore when I wake up, that’s all. I think it’s because I end up collapsing wrong when you pull all this stuff out of me.” She laughed nervously and Orobas could feel the half-truth in their bond. His eyes narrowed and his voice had a hard, almost dangerous cut to it. 

“Do not lie to me again. You are stalling.” Lily looked down with shame coloring her mind.

“Just,” she fluttered her hands about as though the gesture conveyed something to him, “I just hate this part. That’s all. It makes me feel anxious.” Orobas hummed.

“If you want,” a smile that was lost in the space between wicked and comforting graced his fine features, “I can always take that too, you know.” Lily was suspicious of his sudden physical display of emotion as soon as he pulled the smile across the face he wore. He had meant it as a joke, both the offer and the smile, but he was willing to be pleasantly surprised with something -  _ anything _ \- else to eat from her. For her part, she considered it for a long moment. 

“I’m not sure...if I trust you enough for that just yet.” Her words were slow and carefully chosen, but rang with honest hesitation. She side-eyed him and he could feel her waiting for an argument or anger. He could probably wear her down for it if he wanted to, winning the first good meal from her he’d ever had. It’d be easy, she was in a vulnerable state and wouldn’t fight back for too long before she gave in and let him at the other emotions. The thought made his mouth water. 

“Fair enough.” He gave a human shrug. Lily looked at him suspiciously. 

“Fair enough?”

“You do not want to give me the emotion. It is outside our temporary contract and yours alone to give. Fair enough.” 

“You aren’t going to try to trick me into letting you?” Orobas looked at her, that vaguely wicked smile returning in force, revealing sharp teeth. He loved it when she proved to be less naive than he thought. 

“I considered it,” he said honestly, her brows rising at the admission, “but at that point, I could take any of your emotions I wanted at any time. You do not have to be willing for me to feed on you. It is just better when we both benefit from it, don’t you think?” The words inspired a bit of fear in her and she nodded her understanding. “Besides, you hold more power in this bargain than you think. You could dig up that church at any time if you wanted with your internet, I’m sure. They’d be here in the hour to destroy me or I would have to flee this place nonetheless. There is much you could do to inconvenience or kill me. I would rather you didn’t. I’ve come to enjoy watching you worry yourself back and forth about whether or not I will be comfortable as I sleep or asking if I want any of your dinner. It is,” he paused and mulled over words, “endearing, though also useful.” Lily listened carefully, chuckling nervously at the end. 

“Thank you.” His brow twitched in genuine surprise but otherwise returned to its neutral state. 

“I’m not sure what kindness you’re accusing me of, but I can almost assure you it was self-serving at best.” She laughed at his jab. He was only partially joking. 

“For being honest, I think.” She looked at him with a sad smile before furrowing her brow, “And for not stealing my emotions, I think?” He hummed deep in his chest in acknowledgment. 

“Speaking of, can I eat now?” He feigned hopefulness. He was hungry. Lily smiled more genuinely now and laughed. 

“Yeah. Sorry for stalling. I was just -”

“I am under no illusions of how difficult feeding one of my kind is. It is taxing and stressful. It allows great relief, but the resurgence of those feelings often nearly destroys long-time thralls in the absence of their partners” her nose scrunched up at that word. ‘Thrall.’ She hated the term but he didn’t know of a better word for it, “The lack of emotion can create a void sometimes, in which new emotions fill. I believe your lack of fear is giving way to anxiety, a sister emotion to that which I consume. When you are ready, I will take it from you as well if you like. Just keep in mind that for everything I take, it will come back more forcefully if I am not here to siphon it off of you.” 

“I know. But I’ll take all the peace I can get.”

“I can give you more peace if you give me more of your pain.” He nudged her when he said it so she would know he was only kind of serious. Lily muttered wordlessly in response and nudged him back before laying down on the couch with her toes just barely not touching him and her head against the armrest. He sat up, unwillingly excited at the thought of a free meal, even an unappetizing one. 

Before he peered into her with his Singing Eye and pulled the fear from her soul, he looked her over. She looked healthier, even if she was still dangerously thin. Lily waited patiently for him to begin, carefully breathing in an attempt to control the anxiety in her mind. Her neck would be stiff again tomorrow if he let her sleep like this and he groaned internally. This was why he didn’t like having thralls. He started getting attached to them and then that annoying feeling of responsibility for their welfare would set in like cancer. 

Orobas said nothing as he moved to leer over her. The extra eye split open on his forehead and he tapped her nose with a single claw to get her to open her eyes. The entranced vacancy took over her visage and he dove into the fears she offered, consuming the boiling sludge from her sleep paralysis, diving further and further into the memories of the fear each time he fed from her. He hunted for new instances of terror like a desperately hungry animal flipping over rotten logs in search of the slimy, nutritional things that lived beneath them and devoured them all the same. 

By the time he had taken all that he could from her without hurting her, he pulled away. Lily lay beneath his gaze in a tired, almost euphoric state. Her eyes looked up through him vacantly and a small smile graced her lips. The nervous tension in her body was gone, tucked safely away now in the coursing magic of his own veins. Her neck was bent sharply in her ragdoll state and her shoulders were cocked in such a way that he knew they would be sore from tomorrow. He cursed aloud in his own infernal language, knowing she was too dazed for the moment to hear. 

When he rose from her limp body, Lily was cradled in his arms. Her eyes had closed and she was starting to drool a bit from her slackened jaw, inspiring a growl of irritation. It only took a moment to go and plop her into her bed. She stretched and then curled up when he did, but he was already leaving the room by then. Her banket was still on the couch with her chosen pillow. He ignored them and sprawled across the narrow cushions of the couch before stilling like a corpse to rest. He passed the night hours in his normal trance state and Lily woke up the next morning feeling decidedly less sore than she had before. 


	6. Name Your Price

By the end of the week, Lily had left behind some of the heavy pain that weighed down the bags beneath her eyes. She was still unhealthily thin, but her cheeks looked the slightest bit less hollow and her appetite was becoming more regular. She only ate once a day most days, and almost always at Orobas’ urging. On the seventh day, she surprised him by rising before her usual time and beginning to make a small breakfast. It was only a single scrambled egg and a piece of toast and she only ate part of it before offering the remains to his endless hunger, but the fact that she had even tried to eat this early in the morning was a big improvement for her. 

Always hungry, Orobas’ inhuman face whisked the scraps away in the blink of an eye. He had felt like resting in the bestial form he had used to escape the Churchmen a week ago. It was easier than stooping under the ceilings in his natural state and was less unsettling to Lily when he didn’t emote. She had a half nervous, half sad emotion hanging about her side of the connection today. It would teeter one way or another like the blip of air in a leveling stick until he finally had enough of it. 

“What is on your mind, Bat?” Orobas was sitting before her on the floor, having just played the part of a glorified trash can for her leftovers, not that he minded. He liked the eggs. She had put rosemary in them and he complimented her on it, hoping the adjacent nod to her making herself breakfast would encourage her to do so more often. 

Lily looked thoughtfully at him for a moment before averting her eyes and shrugging. Her mind flashed disappointedly and he snarled at her lack of a response to make her jump and look at him. His face morphed from a ferocious beast to the picture of calmness in the time it took for her eyes to flick back at him. “We have discussed this. I do not pry any more than is necessary, but you cannot lie to me. Trying to do so or to omit information from me is,” he paused, thinking of a word that accurately defined the sheer annoyance at her audacity to lie to him knowing that they  _ shared their minds _ . Finding nothing, he settled with, “irritating, to say the least.”

“S-sorry,” she swallowed a nervous cough. He sighed. 

“What is on your mind?” It was more of a demand now than the question it had been before. Lily mulled over the answer for a moment, wringing her hands. 

“I was just thinking about the,” she waved her hands in the way he’d come to know she always did when she was trying to make a point but was frightened of her listener’s focus on her words. A deflection technique to draw attention elsewhere. 

“The?”

“The deal thing we have going on.”

It was his turn to feel a nervous twist of his stomach. He was only just beginning to recover his strength. While Orobas was more than certain he could fend off most of what could come, he was still frightened of what new technology the Churchmen might bring against him. Here, in an enclosed space with enough witnesses around to keep the worst of their attacks at bay, he was safe. Lily had been a blessing for him and he had thought that their cohabitation was going quite well for her as well. At the end of the day, however, his options would be to kill her and take her place or just leave if she bid him vacate. He had no intention of killing her after the lengths he had gone to protect her, so that left one other option for him. Leave. 

“The agreement, yes?” Orobas peered at her and she at him for a long moment. He wanted to speak first, but he needed to let her sit and think about this. He knew how people like her worked. The longer Lily looked at him the more she’d rethink her choice to throw him out. Pity and honor were good ways to control those that couldn’t be bribed, so he just needed to - Lily finally burst forth with her concerns.

“Are you really going to get me a cat? Do you really think I can take care of one? I can hardly take care of myself and I’ve been trying to get better so I could actually give it the care it needs but I just don’t know if I’m-” He nearly fell through the floor, he was so simultaneously surprised and relieved. He had never been in a situation where he so relied on a human and surprise was not an emotion he felt often. It was only through practice that the only physical response he had to the outburst was a slight slackening of his jaw and wide eyes. 

“You’re worried,” he cut her off, “about the  _ cat _ ?” Lily almost had tears in her eyes after her tirade and her mind was as anxious as ever. Orobas didn’t know whether he should laugh or be furious that she had made him feel such a deep jab of concern for his own wellbeing. 

“I mean, I haven’t even gotten a litterbox or any toys,” she gestured around the apartment while the tears kept building, “I’ve only just got my apartment clean and to do that, I literally needed encouragement from a-a  _ demon _ . I can’t get a cat. It’ll just suffer because I’m not capable of doing anything by myself and I just shouldn’t have one.” She kept stammering as the tears began to fall down her face. Sobs began to wrack Lily’s frame soon after and her arms wound around herself as though she were desperately trying to keep the shattering parts of herself from falling to pieces as she cried. 

Doubled over and crying hysterically about a  _ cat _ , Lily didn’t see him when he moved. Orobas’ form shifted so he could join her on the couch, ready to provide comfort so that she would come to rely on him more. It was a textbook move amongst his kind. Humans did not often throw away what they felt was necessary and he had not at all liked that there was a doubt in his mind about his usefulness when she questioned their agreement. He resolved to make himself so ingrained in her day to day life now that he wouldn’t need to feel that concern again. 

Lily felt the cushion depress next to her and looked up, expecting the dark-skinned humanoid face with the fine statuesque features and the ears from a fairytale, but she saw nothing. Instead, a small nudge to her side had her looking down into the fiery red-orange eyes, only  _ just _ passable for a living creature of this plane, of a big black cat. He was fluffy and his tail wrapped around him delicately with the grace that only a cat could command. The edges of him, freshly transformed, twisted and curled off of him like smoke for a moment before what had before been his mane of shadowy tentacles settled into the fluffy disguise of wispy cat fur. The cat didn’t open its mouth at all when his voice rang through the space, very clearly centered on him. 

“I promised you a cat that wouldn’t suffer for being your pet,” he lifted a big paw, almost as big as the palm of her hand when his weight spread it out on her leg, “I can assure you, I will most certainly  _ not _ be using a litterbox or needing cat toys, though you should probably purchase them to maintain appearances nonetheless.” Orobas headbutted her arm in an incredibly cat-like fashion. It remained, still trying in vain to defend herself on the outside from pain that welled up from within. “I would, however, appreciate a tall cat tree if it is in your power to provide one. If not, I can provide one for myself. It gives me a good vantage point and most have beds built in that will be suitable alternatives to the couch.” Rearing up onto his hind legs, he headbutted her cheek, wiping away her tears with his warm, soft head. His paws kneaded at her shoulder gently and he allowed the body to begin a rolling purr. 

It took her a moment of uncertainty before she dropped the safety net of her arms and allowed herself to pet him. He arched into her touch and chased her hands this way and that like a real cat. It didn’t take long until the warm glow of happiness began to return to her just a small glint at a time. She nearly forgot that he was the same thing that killed and devoured two humans in this very room just a week before. He allowed her to play with him for a time before hopping onto the table before her and regarding her with steady, fiery eyes.

“I know that it is only a technicality for now, but you will find my acting skills quite impressive. This isn’t the first time I’ve played at being a cat before.” If he had been a lesser demon, he would have sounded smug in his confidence, but he was more experienced than that. If he hadn’t been a cat, he’d have looked the part too. “I thought it would be wise to start you out with a more...durable kind of cat before bringing in another,” she nodded. “I agree to be your pet until you feel comfortable with adopting something from your own plane. In exchange, I wish to continue using your home and consuming your fear with the addition of your anxiety.” He regarded her steadily, waiting for a counteroffer. Lily looked at him for a long moment, the childish glee at him being a cat wearing off quickly. 

“I don’t know about the addition just yet,” he narrowed his eyes, “But I’m okay with continuing the deal like this.”

“What would persuade you to give me  _ anything _ in addition to your fear? Keeping up this form requires a constant flow of energy that I will need to replace,” not untrue, but perhaps just a bit situationally exaggerated, “it makes it much more worthwhile to me if there’s a little something more to eat.” Orobas smiled all at once, going from a large, common housecat to a horrifying visage of eyes and teeth. It had been intended to scare her, but she was becoming more resilient to his attempts to spook her every day. 

“I’ll give you rage.” Lily’s voice was small enough that, at first, he thought she was going to immediately change her mind. 

“Rage?” Orobas nearly laughed, but his curiosity stopped him. “What rage have  _ you _ got to give  _ me _ , Little Bat?” She wrapped her arms back around herself and leaned forward, still thinking. 

“More than I think you realize, Orobas.” Lily’s eyes were distant again and their link dripped with hesitation. 

“Let me taste it, then.” His voice was a challenge and it made her brow furrow. She was vexing him by promising his favorite food, to be sure. He loved rage. It was heavy, suffocating, and wet. Like a bucket of soft, warm guts pulled fresh from a bleeding body. His shadowy tentacles whipped about in something between anger at being taunted and anticipation at having potentially secured his favored sustenance, muddling their disguise as fur and marking him again as something not from this world. Patience was a learned virtue, especially for those who had only ever known hunger. Lily blinked at him slowly. 

“Right now?” She looked afraid. 

“I want to know about this rage you have hidden so well from me. I want to know how it tastes, how deep it runs, so I can know it is worth it to me to pay for it,” the unmistakable shrug that rolled his shoulders looked very out of place on a cat’s body. “Think of it as judging a cut of meat before you buy it,” Lily said nothing for a long time. 

“It scares me.”

“Why?”

“Because I hate it and I can’t control it. It makes me feel bad.”

“Then that is all the more reason to let me take it from you. All the more reason to trade it for something you would rather have. You aren’t using it, after all.” She chewed her lip and released her hold on her sides to look down at her hands, wringing them. 

“Take it then.” Her voice was smaller than it had ever been, but it didn’t stop him from stepping into a humanoid form and lifting her chin to bring her gaze to his singing eye all in one motion. It took him a moment to find what she was offering. What she had wasn’t quite pure enough to be rage, but it was anger. Hot and jagged like the charred surface of a spit-roasted beast, it flooded him. It was tinged with the rotten taste of fear and the smooth silk of sadness, but the anger rolled and boiled with a life of his own. There wasn’t much at first and he was just beginning to pull away when a wave washed over him and dragged him down with a clawed hand. Not that he minded. 

It was thick, like tar, and the faces of a dozen people flashed by. Orobas wanted dearly to stop and to feed, but this was reconnaissance. Surface anger only. He was able to gorge himself on it still, though. Most of it was her family, it seemed. Oh, she hated them. She hated them with vengeance for not being there when she needed them, for abandoning her. This hate was paired with shame. She didn’t want to hate them.

Then there was the hate for those who had hurt her. There were a lot of faces here as well, and Orobas nearly didn’t notice the change because of how the faces of her family faded into this new hate. These people had a hand in causing her to suffer, knowing full well that their actions were causing her harm. This is where the hate of her assailants lived. The hate here carried an undertone of fear. She hated them because they made her afraid, either of them or of the world around her. It was their fault she couldn’t leave her apartment. 

This hate also blended from the previous one to a new taste. It was for one person and one person alone. It was the hate she had for herself. It was the hate of being afraid, weak, small, not enough. It was the hate she saw in the mirror, the hate of the shame, the hate of the fear. It bordered on fury but wasn’t quite unbridled enough for the spark to catch. It tasted like sadness and it was nearly as vast as he’d ever seen something as petty as hate go. 

In these amounts, it was typically rage that he found, but she hadn’t quite been pushed that far just yet. Then again, most humans weren’t capable of producing large amounts of rage over long periods of time. It typically only boiled over temporarily from anger before receding back into the core of whatever had caused it. Lakes of sustained rage were a rare treasure, but this would suffice for now. This would be a fine meal any day of the week, far finer than piss-yellow fear. It made him crack a grin that split his face from ear to ear. It was probably for the best that Lily could not see it. 

Orobas drew himself back begrudgingly. A low, pleasant rumble, not unlike the cat purring he had been mimicking earlier, shook his torso. He just managed to calm the maddening smile to something more humanly pleased before Lily regained her sight. He didn’t drop her chin just yet but instead peered deeply into her eyes with his own. He was damn near as close to drunk as his kind could get off of the hate she harbored. It made his stomach gnash at the bit and he had to fight the urge to feed like a sark with the scent of blood. 

“Oh, Little Bat. You do not know rage. You are not so unhinged to be able to sustain that kind of flame, but you know the boiling heat of anger. And your anger is a burning ocean I will gladly drink for you.” His clawed hand released her chin to caress the side of her face and his eyes glittered like burning coals. “Name your price.” 


	7. Glutted

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI! I've been very busy in light of the COVID crisis going on. This is a _bit_ later than my preferred weekly update, but also a bit longer. Just popping in to assure anyone reading until this point that I'm not dropping the story, it'll just be slow until the end of the month. Thanks a ton to anyone reading and I hope you're enjoying yourselves!

Lily was quiet for a long time as she recovered from his deep delve into her anger. It was hard for her to have been made to experience it without the hefty relief of having all that he touched consumed. She was sad and afraid and it made him feel that obnoxious twinge of guilt again. Orobas hadn’t known she would react so badly to his probing her emotions. No wonder she didn’t want this. 

When the tears started falling down her cheeks as she lay staring at the ceiling, he grasped at straws for how to comfort her. He wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted him nearby because he could feel the resentment in their bond. Orobas had pushed too far and he knew it. If he didn’t fix that soon, her trust in him would falter. He worked his mind this way and that, allowing his guilt to drip through the connection to her so that she would know he really hadn’t meant to hurt her. Most humans felt energized or violent after delving into anger. Lily had shut down. 

“Little Bat?” He tried. Nothing. “Lily?” She blinked at him and her breathing shifted. He sighed, loath to do what he was about to do. “I apologize. I had no idea it would impact you so. It was not my intention to harm you. You do know that, yes?” He could count on one of his three-fingered hands how many humans he had apologized to of his own volition in his entire existence. He hated apologizing for trying to eat - to _live_ , but she needed to hear him say it so she would listen to his following offer. “I would like to make it up to you. A gift, if you will.” 

Lily’s head turned and she made herself look at him for the first time since she pulled out of the stupor following being emotionally laid out for viewing. Tears rerouted and fell to the side, dripping over the bridge of her nose to meet her other eye or to flow around it before leaping from there to the arm of the couch where she rested her head. She had no words for him, but he could taste the curiosity in her mind. A gift from a demon?

“You will need to wait until it is dark, but I have something I think you will like.” He had kept to his humanoid form, allowing it to smile an almost genuine smile. Orobas didn’t want her to associate his cat body with the emotions she felt right now. That form was to be connected with comfort and happiness. This one he could throw away in favor of any other form if he needed to. “That said, to make this gift possible, I will need to eat,” hesitation welled up between them as she braced herself to be asked to donate something to his power reserves. “I know you are...vulnerable right now. I have pushed too far today. That said, I will need to leave now to hunt for some energy to use later, Little Bat. Do you think you will be okay being alone until nightfall?”

She thought it over, worry flashing behind her eyes, before nodding. 

“I am only a thought away if you need me, though. You understand?”

Nod.

“Then I will take my leave of you and let you have some time to yourself. When I return, put on warm clothing. The surprise I have for you is cold and I do not want you catching your death because of it. I’ve hardly recovered from the last time I put you back together.” He flashed a smile as dazzling as a faux diamond and stood, shifting into a small blackbird when he did. Orobas made no sound as he fluttered to the broken window, peeling aside the plastic liner she was using as a makeshift cover until it could be fixed and flinging himself out into the world. Lily sighed and rested her head back against the couch, feeling drained like she hadn’t in over a week. 

He stayed closer to her apartment than usual as he fed. He knew how dangerous to themselves melancholy people could be, especially when put under extreme stress. Even as Orobas padded down an alley in the form of a mangy-looking black dog with tufts of thick fur to hide his tentacles, he worried over his connection to Lily. Slowly but surely, she was coming back out of the fog a bit each day, but the suffocating cloud of depressed emotions still weighed on her like a pneumonic blanket. That flash of worry had bothered him, but he tabled it when a strange smell caught his nose. 

Orobas stopped in his tracks and looked the alley over more closely. Nothing appeared out of place, but that smell. It was strange. Following it, he judged it to be an old trail. It lept from one dumpster to another, circled a corner that reeked of dead rats and rotten blood, and then scaled the brick wall out of his canid reach. An animal? The globs of congealed blood and guts left behind had been well picked by other scavengers, but even with all the scents of the other creatures layered over the days-old scent, he still found that smell unsettling. What was it?

 _You are preparing as I asked?_ He checked in on Lily more to console himself that his asset was still safe than anything else. It took her a few minutes to adjust to the idea that they could speak in one another’s heads like this. She was unwittingly impressed by it and that made his chest swell in pride in spite of the situation. Not all of his kind could hold a link strong enough to converse over like this. She didn’t know she had complimented him, but she felt his mood lift with her response. It took her off guard, but it also seemed to lift her own mood as well.

_Um. Yes. I am. I have some warm clothes, but I don’t think I can leave the apartment yet. I’m still really not comfortable being in the open and -_

_I know it is asking much to insist you trust me, but give me some credit. I know your fear of people and I believe we both know that with me standing between you and the outside world, there is little for you to fret about. I promise it will only be the two of us. And if you decide what I have in mind is too much, just say something and we will stop._ She was still nervous, but she mulled over his words and couldn’t help but agree with him. She _wanted_ to leave her small, safe world in favor of the universe waiting for her on the other side of the apartment door, he could taste the desire. It bordered on lust it was so strong, but the worry was even more tangible. 

_Okay, but if I call it, we stop right then, right?_

_Always, Little Bat._

_Okay. Okay, I’ll try whatever you’re offering._

_You will not regret it. I will not let it be so._

_I hope you’re right, Orobas. I really do._ She was pulling away, back into her own worries and nervous habits when he stopped her. 

_And Lily,_ his voice was all at once serious and it struck her harder speaking through the link than it would have in person. He rumbled when he felt her flinch through their bond, _I have found something…_ he searched for a word that wouldn’t make her panic, it could just be a strange animal of some kind or a fabricated scent from some new human invention, _something that I would like to look into after tonight._ There was a great reluctance about her that told him he hadn’t wholly succeeded in keeping her from worrying, but she seemed willing to trust his judgment when he assured her it was just a strange smell and didn’t comment further. 

As he continued stalking alleys, following his sensitive nose to and fro to dumpsters and carrion, he allowed his thoughts to list about like flotsam on the tides of his immortal mind. Occasionally currents of imagination or reason would take him from one topic to another in aimless, meandering lines. Every now and then a solid flash of a distinct and coherently solid idea would flash by like the scales of a fish beneath the surface of his softly rolling emotions. He was. That was all. He just was and that was that. 

He heard them long before he saw them. Orobas even tasted the tension in their emotions before even rounding the corner. When he finally encountered a trio of people, muttering about some kind of sales and shifting glances about as though they were expecting someone, he was decidedly and forcefully nonplussed. Orobas wanted to eat them and be done with his hunting for the day, but it would have been too risky to kill a human in this day and age, even in the dark of night. It had to be necessary to justify such a risk. During broad daylight as it was now, he immediately dismissed the thought sourly. 

He started to walk past them, heading for the dumpster they were using to keep out of the sight of any onlookers walking past the alley. Orobas was perfectly content, even if a bit miffed, to ignore them in lieu of not being able to eat them. It would have been an uneventful hunt if one of the men hadn’t snapped up a discarded can of something and thrown it, yelling, “Get outta here, mutt!” He stopped when the can smacked hollowly against his side and fell to the ground, some of its contents leaking out of the opened end in a slow, grimy ooze like the palpable irritation that rose from him. Twisted atop that seeping irritation was a single, poisonous flower of smug satisfaction. 

It would have been _wrong_ to eat a person in broad daylight, but one that _attacked_ him? Why, he could have been seriously hurt. Even worse still, the man could be a danger to others. Killing him in self-defense would be a drastic and sad measure, to be sure, but it might just _have_ to be done. And if it had to be done, well, it would be a shame to leave a perfectly good corpse to rot, now wouldn’t it?

Humans, damn them, know more about what hunts them than they overtly realize. When the dog they had assaulted froze in place and sighed, an unmistakably _un_ animalistic response, their heartbeats began to speed up but they couldn’t exactly name the reason why. He could smell the rising adrenalin on their skin as he slowly turned to look at them with only-just-natural eyes. Instincts screamed and wailed that this was not a dog, he knew. The uneasiness was palpable. An offshoot of fear laced with anger’s younger sibling, irritation. 

Nestled right in their cores like a parasite, the pointed understanding that he was something that walked like a dog, talked like a dog, but absolutely was not a dog made them sickly nervous. At the end of the day, a scared, hunted primate that clawed at every rung of the food chain to get where it was today was still just a scared, hunted primate. Now it just didn’t know to trust that twisting of the gut. Those primal parts knew that the only reason something pretended to be something else was to be better at hiding from predators or to be a better predator itself. 

As he stood there in the alley, he was not hiding from them. That told them all they needed to know about which side of the camouflage he was on. Even more importantly, it told them which side _they_ were on.

Gaze leveled at the group of men, he waited. Shaggy head down, eyes burning with his rolling irritation, stance decidedly relaxed in the way one predator does to prove a point to an unwelcome invader. The easy, loose stance of something so utterly convinced of their dominance that other, lesser creatures, should take heed before he was bothered enough to make them heed it. Orobas waited. He was willing to let them backpedal. His pride was not so in control that he wouldn’t allow them to back down. He hoped they wouldn’t. He would give much for an excuse to take out his frustrations on the hapless fools before him. 

“Whatcha looking at, mutt? Go on,” another man spoke up, sounding firm enough to make up for the nervous look in his eye. Orobas’ minute movements, long ago created as a habit meant to simulate breathing around humans to put them at ease, ceased. It was a minute change, but the prey animals would sense it. They always could. 

“Man, there’s some’n wrong with that thing. Look at its eyes, man, they ain’t right.” The third man was darker complected than the first two. He shuffled a step away. This one would probably live, at this rate. Pity. Orobas was ever hungry for meat. There was just never enough. 

“Don’t be a pussy, its a fucking dog and we got product to move,” the first man sounded fierce, reaching behind him and lifting his shirt with short, jerky movements. Orobas had become well acquainted with the scent of gunpowder in his brief time back on the human plane. The deep scent reminded him of ashes and the barest hint of pungent sulfur, “I don’t give a shit if its a dog or not if it doesn’t get a move on, I’ll fuck it up.” This one was the youngest. He had a distinct air of trying to prove something that made Orobas want to laugh cruelly. Maybe he should. Their fear would be just as good fuel as their bodies. It was certainly a thought.

“The fuck you will, man. You go firing off shots and the cops’ll be here before you can push anything to anyone. Use ya damn head.” The darker man. The older and smarter man. Orobas liked him. He listened to the parts of him whispering in his ear to walk away. The last thing Orobas needed was to be tempted by an easy but risky meal. Oh, he wanted to taste the screams, though. He wanted to feel the blood on his tongue, hot with life and thick with fear. 

Oh hell. He was getting used to that wretched tasting fear he siphoned from Lily. Lovely. He was a demon of standards and fear? Fear was a subpar meal. He needed to find some anger. That’s what he wanted. Fury, rage, the burning desire to _retaliate_ , _vengeance, aggression, ferocity, wrath-_

The second piped up, snapping him from the tightening whirlpool of thought “He’s right, dude, just let it go. Its a goddamn dog. What’s it gonna do, report us?” He glanced between the first man and Orobas, “Why the hell you so worked up anyway? You haven’t been skimming again, have you? You _know_ Tazer will fuck you up if you been doing that again.” The first man spun and shoved the barrel of the gun into the second man’s chest.

“What Tazer don’t know won’t goddamn hurt him, but it sure to _fuck_ can hurt you if you don’t shut your goddamn mouth.” The second man held up his hands and took a step back, eyes one the gun leveled at him. The third man also eyed him, weary but unsurprised and deceptively calm. They feared his unpredictableness and it stank, but the first man. Oh, he was angry. He was angry enough that Orobas’ veins sang in longing. 

“Ike, what do you think they’re gonna say if you shoot one of your own. Man, we’re here to back you up. You don’t want us here, say the fuckin’ word and we’ll fuck right off.” His words were brave and perhaps the only one who saw him gravitating towards what he assumed was the man’s own gun was Orobas. 

Dinner and a show? What an opportunity. The fear oozing out of the men stung his nose and tempted his hellish stomach all in one passing breeze, but Orobas gladly let it build as they argued amongst themselves. He would snap it up in the dying breaths of the lot of them when this was all over if he was lucky. The posturing continued and he was all but forgotten until he calmly sat, still steadily eyeing the group before him. The rising anger of the first man called to him like the drugs they were selling. He could smell each of them, acrid and sweet, thick and heavy, he knew one of the herbs that humans liked to smoke and eat. It had been around for a long time. 

Orobas was his own kind of addict he supposed. Addicted to good food at any rate. Any second now, they would be just preoccupied enough. Any second. His power gathered under his skin like a living tesla coil, arcing to his limbs in anticipation. Orobas mind all but shut down the connection to Lily. She didn’t need to see this side of him, it would scare her. In its place, he reached first for the oldest man. Gently brushing past and raising the hair on his skin with the chill of it. 

_He is going to shoot you. He’s out of control. A Junkie. You should let me have him. Leave him to me._ Orobas pushed the thoughts into him, making his dark skin go ashy. _You will be rid of him and no one will know. They all know he’s going to run eventually. Probably rob you all blind when he does if he can. Best do it now before he turns you all in when the police pick him up._ His eyes found the demon-dog, calmly regarding him. _The junkies always get picked off first. They’re sloppy. They get caught and rat the rest of you out._ Head shaking slowly. _Giving him to me is the best decision here. Yes. You know it. You know it in your bones._

“No.” The word was a whisper on his breath. It was uncertain. It was considering it. “ _No._ ” It was firmer this time. Orobas snarled internally. This one was particularly hard to influence, but then he hadn’t done this in a very long time and the man was older. Older ones were harder until they began to make the transition into being truly elderly. 

“No? No what you piece of shit?” The one waving the gun about had been getting steadily more and more irritated. More and more unstable. Closer and closer to Orobas’ stomach. 

That’s fine. All he had to do was to keep the older one quiet. He was the voice of reason. Orobas could feel that much as he slunk deeper into the man’s head. He was the one their group had sent to keep the addicted one calm and to find out if he was using their amphetamines again. Very interesting. He would have been an excellent choice for this mission. 

Orobas could feel him inching towards outright fear quickly, but he steeled his mind. He accepted the fear and intended to act on it, but he knew panic would be his death. He was more familiar with this feeling than Orobas had anticipated and kept his emotions under a tight lock and a well-hidden key. Another little push, but not at him. He was too tight. Another push and the situation would be his. Careful pressure. Find the weakness. His gaze moved to the second man.

 _You don’t belong here._ He found Orobas’ eyes. _You were going to do great things._ The tendril of thought slid up his spine, skittering like a rat. _You can’t get out, but you can live. This fucking psycho is going to shoot you. Your friend,_ a flash of an image he pulled from the depths of the man’s mind showed the eldest of the three. He tasted like a mentor, like fatherhood. _Not even he can save you from a bullet. And your mother? You broke her heart once when you fell in with these people. Are you going to break it again by making her see you in a casket?_

He too flushed. Eyes glued to Orobas as surely as if he had used his singing eye. He wanted the chaos to break loose. He wanted the food. He was consumed by the thought. He was hungry- no. 

Not hungry. He _was_ Hunger. 

“Don’t look at its eyes, Tom,” he held out a hand as though to stop the second, “That’s not a dog and- _I said don’t look at it!_ ” The dark man had found his voice again, having apparently noticed where Orobas’ focus had turned. Having gotten his protege’s attention and breaking his eye contact with Orobas, the older man looked back, watching the demon carefully but never meeting his eyes. The sour look on the monster’s face would have been hard to miss. He had wanted all three of them, but the young one would have to do and- _wait._ How did he know not to meet his eyes? Not even the Churchmen had known that. 

Orobas didn’t have time to think on it. The youngest of them couldn’t stand the way they weren’t looking at him while he spoke. Ignoring him. It was like the other kids in grade school, though he didn’t make that connection. Orobas did. Hunger roared within him, almost sentient with its gnashing teeth and snarling demands. With a curse, because he knew he had let Hunger consume him and the only way to regain that control was to give it what it wanted to make it relent, he pushed the thought. _All the same._ He hissed. _They’re all the same. They look at you like trash. You were **always** the fuck up to them. They hate you. They pity you. They-_

He would have continued, but that was all he needed to do. The anger skyrocketed into rage and burst into fury like a firework. Living shadow, fast as the flash of light that created it, he moved between the young one and the others, bowling them away from his target. The bullet left the gun and buried itself harmlessly in the wall, far to the side. Orobas had knocked his hand wide of his mark. Standing on two legs, tall enough to loom over his prey like a spider gazing down at a fly, his eye opened and sang its song, dropping the defensive walls of his prey like sheets of broken glass. They plinked unheard into the raging waters of the man’s mind. 

He held the fury there. He slowed the perception of all that wasn’t the feeling of the rage and above and below, he drank from the burning, stagnant waters like a man lost in the desert drank from an oasis. He fed on the sheer obsession of it, gnawing into the bones of the sad, scared little boy underneath it all. It only took a few seconds. He wasn’t slow or careful like he was with Lily. This wasn’t meant to last or to be gentle. This wasn’t a symbiotic agreement. This was predation. 

Sipping the last of the emotion from the empty bowl that had held the waters of the man’s mind, his prey collapsed, unconscious. He was more than satisfied. Orobas turned, so glutted that he wanted nothing more than to nap and process the energy he had stolen. But first, fuck, why was there always a ‘but first’ in this godforsaken plane of existence? First, he had to take care of these two. 

The older man had taken up a position in front of the other. His gun was pointed at Orobas, steady, even though what he faced was a monster. Standing on two legs, three tails whipping behind him, his six eyes that shone red in the sunlight like the frantic dancing of the red energy beneath his shadowy skin, the man should have been shaking. The man behind him reeked of piss.

“We don’t want any trouble.” His words were calm. Orobas cocked his head to the side. “Just let us go. No one will believe us if we tell them what we saw. You know that as well as we do.” Eyes narrowed the demon responded.

“I know. But tell me, how do you know?”

“Please. Just let us walk. You got what you came for.”

“Did I?” Orobas smiled a crocodile’s grin.

“We leave his body for you. You clean up the mess before the cops get here. Everyone goes home happy.” He held out his hand slowly. A handshake? How quaint. Orobas liked this human. He didn’t terribly want to kill him. Something about him kept nagging him, a breeze rustling the waters of his mind. 

“Very well, human. You are quite interesting. I like you,” the wash of tentacles on his head swished in the current of emotion, “take your son and leave. I will rid you of the problem and we both walk away all the better for it, hmm?” He leaned forward and, just to be an ass, licked the man’s palm with his rough tongue. He recoiled but let him finish the act before grabbing the second man and scurrying away. Once he was out of sight, Orobas took in his surroundings. There were no windows in this alley, but the scant foot traffic outside of it had noticeably dispersed. 

Unceremoniously, he dumped the man’s body, living but catatonic, down his gullet. There would have been no recovering from the way Orobas had ripped through his mind. It was one thing to siphon off emotion like a benevolent leech and another to tear open the emotions like a shark in a blood frenzy. 

True to his word, there was nothing left of the altercation when he was done. He even fixed the hole in the wall of the building where the bullet had landed, smoothing over it with magic that mended the brick. He felt better than he had since coming to this begotten shithole of a plane. Oh, the powers of good food for the body and soul, he chuckled to himself.

For the next few hours, he hunted lazily and gorged his body further on the flesh of dead animals or those that he himself had killed, again taking the form of a mangy black dog. How the meat died and the state of decomposition was tertiary to him. Fresh tasted better and had more nutrients to give, but at the end of the day, sustenance was sustenance. He had witnessed many a picky eater die of hunger: a stupid way to die, in his opinion. He was crunching through the spine of a dead cat he had found when he felt the panic. 

Lily was afraid of something. Something bad. Her panic was too messy and their bond too new for him to tell exactly what, but he had turned and was in the air on four broad wings as a lithe, featherless creature that had never been seen before in this realm. Something like a beaked cat with a bat’s wings and a long, frilled tail. It winged across the sky almost too quickly for the mortal eye to see, frantically casting his mind through the link to try and catch a glimpse of whatever was frightening her. It was different from the paralysis monsters when she slept. This danger moved quickly and looked unnatural even when it was still. 

All he could see was yellow eyes. A smell like stagnant water left to sit in a dark place crawled through his nose. This was real where the paralysis monsters were a mind’s fiction. He threw himself into the wind towards his thrall, clawing the air with his wings as he flew. It didn’t click at first, but when it did, he cursed himself a fool. Orobas knew what she was looking at. He would have flown faster if it were in any way possible. He could only hope that she would survive until he got to her. He was a fool. Oh, what a goddamn fool.


End file.
